Squiring the Phoenix
by EagleJarl
Summary: [COMPLETE] A metafic of hezzel's fic, 'Following the Phoenix', which is in turn a fic of 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality'. Squiring the Phoenix picks up from where 'Following the Phoenix' leaves off and shows what happens next.
1. Chapter 1

_**Author's Note: **__This is a 'what happens next' metafic of 'Following the Phoenix', which is a fanfic of 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.' Both of those are excellent works and, if you haven't read them, you really should. In particular, read 'Following the Phoenix' before reading this, because Squiring the Phoenix talks about what happens after FtP ends._

* * *

The Entities spoke in universes.

Choose the physical laws and perhaps a base state, let it expand, perhaps modify some of the random parameters on the fly to generate a particular configuration of matter / energy / probability. Humor could be embodied as life; a hopeful message might be a species mastering fire. Dark humor would be a planet exploding and killing all of the (for the context) highly advanced beings thereon. If one wanted to add a soupçon of hope to the darkness of the humor, perhaps the physical laws might be established in such a way that the resulting brain-state of one of those doomed creatures would induce him to send a single escape rocket to carry the last of his race into the void.

Elegance was inseparable from the deep structure of one's message; the master poets among the Entities could speak elaborate elegiacs using universes containing only a few fundamental forces. The first word of babytalk usually consisted of a universe in which every particle was specified individually, each with its own set of laws.

Of course, because of the difference between spoken language and universal information exchange, there is no way that the conversation of the Entities can truly be understood by their infinitely-distant primitive human ancestors. Still, if one were to create an allegory, an enormously oversimplified lie that somehow showed a distant glimmer of the truth, then it might have sounded like this:

"Tell me a story, Daddy. A scary story!"

"A scary story, huh? Well, okay...I think you're old enough for this one. Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was something called 'death'..."

* * *

Harry emerged from Ignotus's resting place feeling...shellshocked. His brain seemed to be grinding its gears, getting nowhere. None of his inner personas were saying a word, being just as flummoxed as he was. How did one react to becoming the student of a wizard who had lived when Charlemagne was born?

His stomach growled loudly. _Apparently, one reacts by being really, really hungry,_ he thought.

"Well?! What did he _say_?" Hermione demanded. She looked like she was about to vibrate into another dimension from sheer need to know, and from frustration at not being allowed to meet Ignotus herself.

Harry's eyes tracked over to her and, with great effort, he managed to push words through the fog that lay across his mind. "He said he'll help. Let's eat."

She clenched her fists in frustration, but could tell that Harry wouldn't be saying any more. She grabbed his hand and the world burst into fire; when it cleared, they were at the back room of the Leaky Cauldron. Harry dropped into a chair moments before Dumbledore appeared in a fireflash of his own. The Headmaster wasn't quite as overborne as Harry, but he was definitely quiet and thoughtful. Hermione studied them both for a moment then gave an irritated _humph_ and went off to ask Tom for some stew.

One could not say that, under these circumstances, Hermione Granger waited _patiently_, but she at least didn't try to ask any questions while they ate.

After a few minutes and some food, Harry came back into focus. He looked at his companions consideringly and then turned to Dumbledore. "Would you please talk to the Ministry and get things started finding the Healer we'll need? And any lab resources you think we should have."

Dumbledore smiled faintly, recognizing a dismissal when he heard one. With a brief nod to Hermione, he vanished in a puff of phoenix fire.

"WELL?!"

"He's alive, Hermione. Alive, and still powerful. He read my mind—not just Legilimency, he took _everything_. He can't move, he can barely speak, but he'll help. He gave me a few hundred scrolls and told me to come back in three months. And yes, he said to bring you." He smiled as Hermione blew out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding and her foot stopped trying to tap a hole in the floor.

"So what happens now?" she asked.

Harry thought about it for a moment. "As I see it, we've got two major problems—curing death, and also dealing with ensuring that the Muggle and magical world integrate smoothly. You might not approve of him, but Professor Quirrel—"

"Voldemort."

Harry sighed. "Voldemort was just a mask he put on, Hermione. Not even a particularly clever mask—it was deliberately built to play to all the tropes of an Evil Overlord, to induce particular reactions in his enemies." He hestitated. "I'm actually not sure who the real man was, but he will always be Professor Quirell to me. In any case, he was right that a war between Muggles and wizards would be an extinction event. Right now, here in Britain, things are going smoothly, but the Americans are already pushing to be involved, and they'll expect to be senior partners. The European wizarding community is still being cagey about coming out, waiting to see how it works here in Britain; the longer that goes on, the less trust the Muggles will have when they finally do come out." He grimaced. "It's a distraction, but it's an important one."

Hermione raised her eyebrows. "Guiding the single largest merger of two nations in history—Muggle and magical—is a _distraction?_"

"Of course," Harry said, his tone implying that it wasn't the brightest question his brilliant friend had ever asked. "The real thing we should all be working on is curing death. We can _do it_, Hermione! Ignotus and his brothers, they did it! They learned how to keep anyone from dying, ever. That's what the Cloak _does_—it keeps your soul in your body, no matter what. All we need to do is cure aging and disease—well, and probably invent ultra-fast wound healing—and then figure out how to mass-produce and distribute the Cloaks."

Hermione sat back, her arms folded across her chest. "Oh, is that all? Just cure aging? Well, _that_ should be simple enough."

Harry sighed. "Look, do you disagree? Is there something else that you think is more important than those two things?"

He had to give her credit, she thought about it before she answered. "Not _more_ important, but _as_ important," she said. "If you're really worried about wars of extinction, then we should take action to make sure that can't happen. Disarm all the nuclear bombs, maybe?" She paused. "No, we'd also need to worry about bioweapons. I'm not sure how to handle that one."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. It was actually a really good point. "I thought about the nukes a while ago," he admitted. "I don't think it's practical. If we just went ahead and did it, it would cause its own problems once someone noticed, and we're unlikely to get everyone's permission. What we _could_ do, though, is put a colony on the moon or Mars."

Hermione blinked and then tipped her head in thought. Harry could almost see the gears engage inside her brain. "I wonder if there's a range limit on phoenix travel? Xare can't take me anywhere I haven't seen, but maybe a picture would be good enough? I know the Freedom and Spirit probes sent back a lot of images..."

Harry nodded. "Right. We'll need to check that. If not, maybe a telescope? I think the Keck is the biggest, but it's been a while since I checked. And maybe we could use phoenixes to set up a distributed array of telescopes, turn them into one giant one so that we could image exoplanets. Oh, or maybe—"

Hermione held up her hand. "That's enough for now, Harry. The politics is the most immediately important issue. As _I_ see it, our problem is credibility—you may be the Boy Who Lived here in Britain, but to the rest of the world you're eleven. We'll need someone who's known internationally. Someone like Professor Dumbledore."

Harry hesitated. Dumbledore was too recently a deathist for him to be entirely comfortable with the man's judgement. "Maybe," he said doubtfully. "We can look around. Still, don't forget about that space travel thing. I think it's important."

* * *

Sarah Painter had been working at the UK Space Agency for four years when the world changed. Before that, she'd fought her way through a masters and then a Ph.D., double majoring in electrical engineering and computer science. As a woman in EE and CS, her classmates looked at her as an odd duck. That was just a taste of what she faced once she finally wedged her foot in the door at the UKSA. In the old-boys' school of the Space Agency she'd been condescended to, not-so-quietly lusted after, and told both subtly and not so subtly that, as a woman, it was really cute and precocious that she was trying to do science.

She was outside smoking a cigarette, trying to cool down after trying to explain to Chris—again!—that his instrumentation package wasn't the only package on the vehicle and he was drawing four more watts than what was allocated to him from the RTG and he had to pare it back. He'd nodded, smiled, and told her not to worry, that he'd 'talk to the guys over in design and get this little snafu straightened out.'

When the world changes, one might expect a big flash of light, a rumble of thunder—at least a chorus of flying children with harps and halos, right? One did _not_ expect a girl to flash into existence in a pillar of Biblical fire with a red-gold falcon sitting on her shoulder. The cigarette fell from Sarah's mouth.

"Hi," the girl said brightly. "I was wondering if I could talk to someone about a space suit?"

* * *

"A witch," Fred said flatly. "An actual witch?" He eyed the woman sitting across from him askance; she was wearing eye-searingly green robes and a tall black witch's hat straight out of his daughter's last-year Halloween costume. He was still trying to decide if she was an SCAer or a loon. The fact that she had just walked into his office, bold as brass, and started talking just made it more surreal.

Dora sighed. "Yes. An actual witch. Here." She pulled out her wand, gave it a flick, and said "Wingardium Leviosa." Pointing it at Fred's chair she lifted him up and floated him around a bit before setting him gently down. "A witch. I don't know why you Muggles are having so much trouble with this. It's not like it hasn't been in all the papers—the Boy Who Lived has been dealing with the Queen herself, for heaven's sake!"

Fred blinked a few times. "Okay." He blinked a few more times. "I have no idea what you're talking about, but that's fine because you're a witch. So, what can I do for you?"

"Harry Potter put together a list of Muggles that he wanted invited to London in order to participate in..." She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and read off of it. "...an international symposium with the aim of determinging how best to combine magic and science in order to eliminate death, disease, and aging. The wizarding world possesses the ability to bypass known laws of physics, and the non-magical world posseses modern technology and the scientific method, which the wizarding world lacks. Together, the two societies can do great things. The symposium will begin Saturday, August 15, 1992 in London, England, and will run until the 22nd. Travel, room, and board will be provided by the symposium. Attendees are invited and expected to perform experiments while at the symposium; research facilities will be provided. Invitees are welcome to bring up to three assistants or co-investigators. Please RSVP no later than August 8th with a list of who will be coming. The bearer of this message will explain your travel."

Fred raised an eyebrow. "Is this a joke?" he asked carefully. "How can a modern society lack the scientific method?"

Dora shrugged. "I have no idea. The fellow who explained it to me was a very nice Muggle chap, although a a bit daft; he seemed to think it was some great revelation, but it's just potion making, right? You combine some ingredients, see if it produces anything, and if it doesn't then you combine some other ingredients. Anyway, I just deliver the messages." She straightened as though remembering something and started patting her pockts.

"Where did I put that Portkey?" she mumbled. Finally she pulled off her hat and reached in, feeling around. Fred watched in bemusement as her arm disappeared up to the shoulder into the eighteen-inch hat.

"Aha! Here it is," she said, pulling out an envelope and riffling through it. From within the envelope she produced a piece of gold paper and handed it to him. On the paper were written the words 'For Doctor Frederick Blaise, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. This is a Portkey; it will become active on August 15 at 12pm your local time. All parties touching the paper at that time will be transported to London with whatever luggage they are touching.'

"Not so sure what there is to explain," Dora said with a sniff. "I mean, it's right there on the paper, innnit? Anyway, I'll just be going. I've got more stops to make." She vanished with a dull _crack!_

Fred stared at the paper in bemusement, then grabbed for the phone. There wasn't much time, and he'd a lot to arrange.

* * *

The balcony was just large enough for two people to stretch out without knocking over the telescope. There was more room than usual tonight, since Dad was out of town; that was all right, though. They'd watch the Perseids together tomorrow, and tonight would be Joel's alone.

He pillowed his hands on his head and lay back to watch the stars wheel above him. Even without the promise of meteors, he could happily watch those sparkling jewels, so infinitely far away, and wonder what it would be like to travel among them.

Joel had wanted to go to the stars since he'd picked up his very first science fiction book at the age of five—The Patchwork Girl, by Niven. He had wanted to _be_ Gil the Arm...well, no. He wanted to be himself, but be what Gil was a picture of: a hero, a protector, an explorer. A Flatlander who became a Belter, who piloted his own singleship, who helped shepherd humanity while they passed through the painful birthing process of leaving Earth and growing into the universe. Joel wanted to protect the sheep from the wolves, and float in space, and see torchships ride out-system carrying a precious cargo of human life. Aunt Mabel and Uncle George could talk about the 'miracles' of Jesus, but the miracles that Joel wanted involved riding fire in the sky and sailing on an ocean of light.

His contemplation of the infinite deeps was broken by motion and light off to his left. He sat up and looked over to see a meteor...no, too slow. Maybe a plane? Awfully bright, though, and more red than wh—holy crap, it was a _bird._ And it was _on fire!_

He scrambled to his feet as the phoenix landed on the railing in front of him. It flipped its wings, took a slight step as though looking for the most comfortable piece of rail, and stared at him.

Its eyes were fire and light and heroism and all the power and majesty of the human race and he fell into them, plummeting as though from a cliff. He fell and fell, images flickering past:

—himself, space-suited and alone in free space, deploying something that would provide part of the energy to raise everyone in the world from poverty to luxury. No, he was dying as his suit ripped on a jutting bolt and all his air dumped into the void and his eyes froze.

—himself on the moon, overseeing the robots that were piling moondust over the first lunar dome. In two months the dome would be complete and he and the fire-light-hope-brother-warrior-pure beside him would begin transporting colonists to their new home. Himself dying of hypoxia from a suit failure.

—himself appearing in fire and light like an angel of old to rescue three engineers trapped in a lunar mine collapse. Himself being crushed in a new collapse.

The question was soundless and infinite, as though the entire universe echoed through him demanding his answer: would he step forward, live his dreams, and lift humanity from its cradle?

"Yes!" he gasped, choking on joyful tears. "Oh god, yes!"

* * *

_**Author's Footnote:**__ I have a mailing list! It can be found at __**bit. do /dks-list**__. There is one email every two weeks, and each one includes links to new postings as well as bonus material not available on the web—world history, character studies, deleted scenes, etc. _

_Also, I have other stories for sale! You can find them over on 'davidstorrs. com'. I've listed the current catalogue and the current prices below; obviously they may have changed if you're reading this long after I posted it. _

"The Draugar War: Opening Salvo" ($1.99), fantasy, novella. It's a spinoff from my story, 'The Two Year Emperor'; High Marshal Albrecht Löfgren arrives for a simple troop inspection but ends up having to lie to High Command, pretend to kill several thousand legionnaires, and—oh yes—fight off the end of the world. Ah well, looks like it's Tuesday.

"One Hot Night" ($0.99), fantasy, novelette. A spinoff from my story 'The Two Year Emperor' in which Ingfred wheels, deals, and cons his way into walking through a legal loophole so that he can make a a fortune selling his memories to a tabloid...and then the law catches up to him.

"Baby Blues" ($1.99), rational horror, novella. Mitchell has escaped from Rikers Island and is desperate to reunite with his daughter, but it's not going to be easy; Rikers is no ordinary prison, Mitchell is no ordinary prisoner, and every human in the city is desperate to get him back behind bars...

"Pay Attention" ($1.99), rational horror, novella. Pay attention. Don't touch the ouija board again. Don't let yourself be distracted. You can keep your mind as long as you don't get distracted. Stay focused. Stay alert. And, whatever you do, _pay attention._

"The Draugar War: Opening Salvo" ($1.99), fantasy, novella. It's a spinoff from my other story, "The Two Year Emperor." Summary: Albrecht never expected that a simpl troop inspection would involve going behind High Command's back, retraining a Legion, and—oh yes—fighting off the end of the world. Ah well, looks like it's Tuesday.


	2. Chapter 2

"Welcome," the young woman said with a smile. She was maybe twenty and had that 'first time staffer' look—still excited and bouncy about meeting 'real scientists, by gosh!' Nancy gave her about two days of working at a symposium this size before she too joined the ranks of the weary and cynical.

"Thanks," Nancy said, forcing herself to smile in reply. She was working on about three hours of sleep so the smile was definitely pasted on. There had been too much to do getting ready for this thing; why in all the blazing pits of firey hell did they give only two weeks of notice? Did they have _any_ idea how hard it was to arrange the time, get someone to cover your lab, gather all your research notes that might possibly be relevant to something with as bizzarely broad a mandate as this thing, organize them into a format for sharing, and— She breathed out, forcing herself to let go of the irritation.

"I'm Nancy Keller and these are my staff, Jason and Lorraine," she said, gesturing to the two excited grad students behind her. "We're really bushed—do you have rooms for us?"

"Absolutely!" chirped Flopsy, or Muffin, or whatever the hell her name was. "The conference is in the Room of Requirement over in Hogwarts, and so are your rooms. It's just a quick pop through the Floo and there will be someone to take your bags and bring you to the conference room. Here, let me show you!"

She bounced to her feet with irritatingly energetic brightness and started to lead them towards a roaring fireplace big enough to roast an ox. Nancy could feel the heat from three feet away. There was a table set up next to it with a large jar of glittery silver dust.

"Here you go!" she burbled. "Just take a pinch of Floo powder, throw it into the fire, step in and say 'Hogwarts' nice and loud and you'll be there in a bounce. Oh, and don't forget to keep your elbows in and get out at the first grate. You wouldn't want to end up in Wales like that last fellow." Her smile was bright and shiny and Nancy just wanted to smack her.

"I don't know what your problem is, young lady," she said in her best make-the-new-intern-wet-himself voice. "Whatever it might be, I am not interested in self-immolating today. Tell us where the hell the conference is and stop wasting our time."

Babs looked horrified. "Oh, right, I'm sorry. Professor McGonagall warned me about this, but I forgot. 'Miranda,' she said, 'the Muggles don't know anything about magic so they aren't going to understand that the Floo is safe, so make sure you show them.' I'm so sorry! Here, I'll go first." She grabbed a pinch of the green dust and threw it in the fire, making it roar up and turn bright green. She stepped in without a care in the world and called out "Hogwarts!" She twirled around for a moment as though she were being spun on a record player, and then vanished with a pop.

Nancy blinked.

"Cool," said Lorraine, pushing her Coke-bottle glasses up her nose. Jason gave one of his braying laughs but didn't say anything.

A moment later, Fluffy—no, Miranda—came twirling back through the fire and stepped out in front of them, brushing a bit of ash off her robes.

"See?" she said.

Nancy forced herself not to growl at Mopsy—damnit, Miranda! It wasn't the kid's fault...probably. Maybe.

"Are you seriously expecting us to step into a goddamn _fire_ just because you have some tric—"

"It's probably fine, ma'am," Lorraine said calmly. "Here, let me try." She grabbed a pinch of the powder, threw it in the flames, and stepped in. "Hogwarts!" she called. With a quick spin she was gone.

She reappeared a few seconds later, rubbing her left elbow. "It's fine," she said. "She wasn't kidding about keeping your elbows in, though. Ow."

Nancy glared at her for a moment but grabbed her roller bag, threw the powder in, and stepped into the suddenly-green flames. "Hogwarts!" she growled. The world twirled around her like it had that one time she dropped acid in grad school. It wasn't any more pleasant this time around.

She was spinning through a cyclone of green fire; something she couldn't see smacked her elbow, making her funnybone shriek and her arm go numb. Up ahead she saw a fireplace grill; she quickly pushed herself to the side and stepped into the grill as she whirled by.

She stepped out of another fireplace in what was either a medieval castle or a really good impession of one. She stopped to look around and stumbled when Lorraine came spinning out of the fireplace and smacked into her. Jason came along a moment later.

"That. Was. Awesome!" Jason said, eyes shining like little stars. "Man, I _love_ this wizarding thing!"

A red-headed teenager in a black robe and a serious expression stepped forward. "Hello, Dr Keller. I'm Percy Weasley, Head Boy of Hogwarts. You're just in time for the introductory meeting. Let me have your bags taken—Twirlmott!" A weird creature appeared with a _crack!_ and a puff of smoke. It was only a couple feet tall, and it looked like a stick figure with a wrinkly potato head the size of a beachball, ears you could use for parachutes, and eyes like something out of one of those anime that Jason liked so much.

"Yes, sir?" the little creature asked. It sounded like it had been sucking on helium.

"Twirlmott, please take our guests' bags," Percy said with a polite nod. "They'll be staying in the Room of Requirement, the version with the '37' on the door."

Twirlmott nodded, grabbed all the luggage, and vanished with a _pop!_ before Nancy could say 'no, wait, stop!'

Percy smiled and nodded to himself as though pleased at how smoothly things were going. "If you'll follow me," he began, "I'll take you to the introductory meeting. I think you'll find it qute interesting."

* * *

David Martinson was barely in the door when his fourteen-year-old son came barreling into the room with a creature of myth and legend on his shoulder.

"Look dad! He followed me home, can we keep him?" Joel asked, grinning impishly at the stereotype.

David looked at the phoenix consideringly.

"I don't know son," he said gravely. "A firebird is an awfully big responsibility. You'd have to feed him and clean his cage—oof!" He braced himself as his son hugged him, laughing at the mutual joke.

"Okay, where did he come from?" David asked, kicking his suitcase aside with distracted ease. "Does he have a name? I'm guessing he's something to do with those British wizards I was reading about?"

Joel nodded. "I think so, yes. He's smart, and he can kinda-sorta talk, but he communicates mostly in images. Peri, can you tell Dad about yourself?"

**_fire | primoridal | heart | light | eternal | courage | endless | inspiration | partner-friend-protector_**

David stumbled and sat down on the couch. "Wow. That was intense." He looked at the bird with new respect. "Okay, so he's intelligent and can communicate, although not in words." He paused. "I really don't know what to ask at this point." He thought about it. "You called him Peri?"

"Yep. Short for 'Hyperion'," Joel said.

David nodded. "Titan of Wisdom, Watchfulness, and the Light, and father of Helios the Sun. Yes, that fits. Glad to see you still remember those old stories." He smiled, remembering the many hours of reading myths and legends and science fiction and fantasy to a much younger Joel at night. At the time, David had had to do a lot of traveling for work, and it tended to show itself by him falling asleep in the middle of a page.

_"And then Bilbo said...the plane...needs toothpaste...check oil light..."_

_"Dad, Dad, that's not what it says!"_

_"Huh? Oh, right, sorry. And then Bilbo said 'I'm old, Gandalf. I know I don't look it but I'm beginning to feel it in my heart.'"_

David smiled a little mistily. Those had been good years; Mary had still been with them then. Ten years, and he still missed her every day.

With a quick cough he brought his attention back to the present. "So, a firebird. No, wait, a phoenix. The _Times_ had that interview with that British girl who was talking to their space agency, she called it a phoenix. Okay, so, why is he here?"

Joel shrugged. "I don't know. I was upstairs last night watching the Perseids and he showed up. I'd been...thinking about wanting to go to the stars, and he asked me if I really meant it. I think that's what he's here for, is to help with that."

"There are two phoenixes known to exist right now, and both of them want to be part of the space effort?" David asked, caught somewhere between surprise and disbelief. "Where were they the past twenty years when we were busy giving up on space travel?"

Peri reared up, flaring his wings wide, threw his head back and sang. The song poured out like liquid light: a challenge, a battle cry, a _demand_ that they rise to their highest, that they fulfill all of the promises they'd made to themselves, undo all the compromises, face up to and, more importantly, _overcome_ their own faults instead of pushing them off on others. It reached into both of them and called forth the fiercest, purest essence of themselves and pointed it at the battle.

When the song stopped, David fell back into his own skin; the world seemed darker...although, perhaps not as dark as it had been before, now that he had the memory of phoenix song. That memory echoed deep within him, plucking on all the strings of hope and dreams that he'd tucked away in order to make room for school and a job and bills and taxes and all the other myriad mundane details of life. It was too late for many of his dreams, but he could help Joel to achieve _his_. After all, wasn't that what fathers did?

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, trying to figure out how to do that. "All right...if the goal is to get to space, then we could get in touch with NASA. Or, I suppose we could go up the chain and talk to someone in government—I'm not sure who would be best, though. And I don't really want to end up with reporters camped on the porch, so let's try to keep a lid on this for now. Or...hm. Let me get that article, I'm sure they said something about phoenixes, but I don't remember what. First thing we'll need is to know more about Peri and what he wants from us."

* * *

"Has anyone compiled a list of all this stuff?" Fred asked.

Nancy shrugged. "Dunno, I only got here a couple hours ago. First thing I saw was a woman who I swear was Mrs Piggle-Wiggle pushing a cart of candy around, including some frogs made out of chocolate that kept trying to hop away. Over at the bar they were filling the water pitchers with a swishy wand and some bad Latin, and some of the drinks were doing swan dives into themselves. A few feet away from _that_ I watched this Scottish woman turn into a cat—a _small_ cat, so goodbye conservation of mass—and about a minute later some guy in a paisely bathrobe turned a marble into a magpie."

Fred frowned. "Why a marble and a magpie? Was he just into alliteration?"

She shrugged. "I asked him that very same question and he said 'Why a magpie? Because I'm bollocks at parakeets.'" She shook her head in disbelief. "I'm glad you're here, Fred. This is a little weird for me; it's nice to have a familiar face around."

Fred smiled and was just starting to open his mouth when a young boy tapped him on the arm.

"Excuse me, Doctors Blaise and Keller?" he asked politely.

"Yes?" Fred asked curiously.

"I'm Harry Potter. Welcome to the symposium. How have you found it?"

"Oh, it was easy," Fred said casually. "I just got off the Portkey and there it was."

Harry blinked. Nancy sighed.

"Kid, where's your dad?" Nancy asked. She didn't _do_ kids. "I'm assuming he was the Harry Potter who sent the invites?"

Harry frowned and took a breath. "No, Doctor Keller. I was the one who organized this symposium. I need to find a way to do ultra-fast healing, age reversion, and a full-spectrum disease cure. We already have a means to prevent death regardless of injury or age, we just need to solve the eternal youth and health part."

"_You_ need, huh?" she said. Christ. Wizards, and now a kid organizing things. Yeah, right. "How old are you, anyway? Nine? Ten?"

Harry's face got cold. "Twelve," he said, clearly hanging on to the shreds of his temper.

"Nancy..." Fred said. "Maybe go easy? Things are weird here, maybe they have some kind of instantaneous education or something? Or maybe he's like the Merlin from legend, he ages backwards or something?"

Harry's face got even colder. "You are in error, Doctor. I am, in fact, twelve years old. I am also the son of an Oxford professor, I have read the Feynman lectures, can do calculus, and, quite frankly, I probably know more about psychology and the function of the brain than both of you put together. I also break physics on an hourly basis and defeated a Dark Lord—not once but twice—was the first one ever to destroy a Dementor, was the one who figured out that Dementors are simply the shadow of Death, was a major participant in the effort to destroy _every_ Dementor during that unpleasantness a few weeks ago, and was the person who instigated a serious effort at curing Death and illness. A job, I might add, which neither of _you_ has seen fit to do, despite working in biogerontology for longer than I've been alive. I would _appreciate_ it if the two of you would stop automatically treating me like a child and actually _use your brains._"

Hot rage boiled up Nancy's throat. "Look, you snot-faced little—"

Fred placed a hand on her arm; she glared at him but stopped talking.

"All right, Mr. Potter," he said. "You're an adult in a child's body and you have a significant list of achievements. Why were you coming over to us?"

Harry's voice was icy cold and precise; he seemed at least as angry as Nancy. "I would like to introduce you to Mr. Throgwattle and Professor Slughorn. Mr. Throgwattle is a senior med-wizard at Saint Mungo's, which is the best hospital in wizarding Britain. Professor Slughorn is undisputedly the best potion master in Britain and quite possibly in the world. I suspect the four of you will have some very interesting discussions. Also, you should be aware of the laboratory facilities; this is the Room of Requirement, and it takes whatever form is desired, and supplies whatever facilities are needed. Simply step out the door, tell the receptionist what you need, and he'll open it to an appropriate lab."

"Thank you, Mr. Potter," Fred said with a polite nod. "Please, lead the way. By the way, we were wondering if anyone has compiled a list of all this magic stuff and everything it can do?"

Harry snorted, not even bothering to turn and look at them as he led them across the room. "Has anyone compiled a list of this science stuff and everything it can do? This school spends seven years teaching a functional level of magical knowledge, and there isn't enough time to study every subject. However, you can pick up a briefing packet at the door; there was a delay and they didn't arrive on time or you would have been given one on the way in.

"The things I think you should be most immediately aware of are Invigoration Draught, Wit-Sharpening Potion, Liquid Luck, and Polyjuice. You'll find descriptions of them in the packets but they are, respectively, a powerful stimulant, a nootropic, a guarantee of successful action, and something that will turn you into another person. The advantages of intelligence enhancement and guaranteed luck should be obvious; I had thought that perhaps Polyjuice could be modified to turn you into a younger or uninjured version of yourself." He led them around a knot of people eagerly discussing the opportunity for using False Memory Charms and Legilimency to exchange knowledge from mind-to-mind. Pushing through a last bit of crowd he brought them to two men who were leaning on the wall and sipping drinks.

"Professor Slughorn, Mister Throgwattle, I'd like to introduce Doctors Keller and Blaise," Harry said, nodded politely. "They are experts on life extension from the Muggle side of things. I think the four of you will have a great deal to discuss. Excuse me." He turned and vanished into the crowd.

* * *

"Okay, can you get it to take the—"

"She."

"Excuse me?"

"She's a girl. Well, no, phoenixes are actually immortal and don't reproduce so they don't really have genders. Still, I think of her as a girl, and her name is Xare. Please don't call her 'it.' And she's just as intelligent as we are; you can talk to her directly."

Patrick "call me Pat" Halligan rubbed his forehead, hard, as though trying to push the ache out. He'd been a systems engineer at the Space Agency for ten years, and Chief Engineer of Life Support Systems for three; he was used to dealing with problems, but he was having a lot of them today. The idea of talking seriously about sending a twelve-year-old girl into the single most lethal environment known to man—i.e., outer space—without any protection aside from a suit, was probably the biggest problem. The fact that the laws of physics were really more like polite suggestions was another—actually, maybe that one was bigger, he wasn't sure. The fact that he was sitting opposite the aforementioned-twelve-year-old girl and she had _a flaming creature of myth_ on her shoulder which was _actually on fire, right now!_ yet wasn't burning anything...and apparently the thing had human-level intelligence and he was supposed to engage it in conversation... He pulled the bottle of Tylenol out of his desk drawer and knocked four back. Screw recommended doses, this day was just getting more painful by the minute.

"Okay, fine. Xare, sorry about this but if you're going to be involved in experiments that could kill someone, then I really need to check. You're actually fully intelligent? Like, self-aware?"

_Caw!_

He sighed. "Right. Maybe, maybe not, but you can't speak English."

"She said yes, sir," Hermione offered.

He really hoped the Tylenol would kick in soon. "Okay, good. Let's try something else. Can you read?"

_Caw!_

"No, sir, she can't," Hermione said.

He rubbed his head again. "Okay, something else then." He pulled three variously-colored pens out of his breast pocket and set them on the desk in a careful line. "Xare, would you please touch the red pen, then the blue one, then the red one again, and then the green one?"

The phoenix gave him a rather old-fashioned look, but it—she! remember the she!—hopped over to the desk and tapped a claw on the indicated pens.

"Huh." He stared at the bird for a moment. So, this is what first contact with an alien species felt like. Well, not really _first_ contact, since apparently these 'wizards' had known about them for years. Still, first contact for him. "Okay, how's your grasp on math? Can you tap your claw two plus three times?"

The phoenix cocked its head at him in confusion.

Sigh. "Okay, no grasp on math," he said. "I suppose that's something that immortal birds made out of fire don't really need. This should be jolly fun."

"Do you really need her to do math, sir?" the girl asked. "You and I can do the math, but don't we just need to know if she can get somewhere?"

Pat shrugged. "I suppose." He shuffled through his folder for a minute and passed over an 8x10. "Okay, uh, Xare, this is a picture of Mare Imbrium. Could you go there based on the picture?"

The phoenix looked at the picture, then hopped back onto Hermione's shoulder and craned her head around to look at her human.

"We need to be able to get there, Xare," her mistress said firmly. "It's important. Everyone, everywhere may depend on it—far more people than the Dementors could ever have killed are at risk if magic and science are mixed and someone decides to use them for evil. We need to have a base somewhere else, so that at least some people can survive. Could you do it? Could you take me there?" Hermione picked up the picture and held it up in front of the bird, looking from Xare to the picture and back.

_Caw!_ the phoenix said. There was a blast of fire and bird and girl were gone.

* * *

_**Author's Footnote:**__ I have a mailing list! It can be found at __**bit. do /dks-list**__. There is one email every two weeks, and each one includes links to new postings as well as bonus material not available on the web—world history, character studies, deleted scenes, etc. _

_Also, I have other stories for sale! You can find them over on 'davidstorrs. com'. I've listed the current catalogue and the current prices below; obviously they may have changed if you're reading this long after I posted it. _

"The Draugar War: Opening Salvo" ($1.99), fantasy, novella. It's a spinoff from my story, 'The Two Year Emperor'; High Marshal Albrecht Löfgren arrives for a simple troop inspection but ends up having to lie to High Command, pretend to kill several thousand legionnaires, and—oh yes—fight off the end of the world. Ah well, looks like it's Tuesday.

"One Hot Night" ($0.99), fantasy, novelette. A spinoff from my story 'The Two Year Emperor' in which Ingfred wheels, deals, and cons his way into walking through a legal loophole so that he can make a a fortune selling his memories to a tabloid...and then the law catches up to him.

"Baby Blues" ($1.99), rational horror, novella. Mitchell has escaped from Rikers Island and is desperate to reunite with his daughter, but it's not going to be easy; Rikers is no ordinary prison, Mitchell is no ordinary prisoner, and every human in the city is desperate to get him back behind bars...

"Pay Attention" ($1.99), rational horror, novella. Pay attention. Don't touch the ouija board again. Don't let yourself be distracted. You can keep your mind as long as you don't get distracted. Stay focused. Stay alert. And, whatever you do, _pay attention._


	3. Chapter 3

_Caw!_ the phoenix said. There was a blast of fire and bird and girl were gone.

"Holy crap!" Pat yelled, leaping to his feet so fast his chair went flying. Once upright he froze...what could he actually do? The girl wasn't here anymore, and he didn't have any way to bring her back. _Should I call her parents?_ he thought, panic rising up his throat. _Who else? Is there anyone who could get her back? She's got maybe thirty seconds, who can I call?!_ The universe seemed to freeze around him as he dithered, trying to force his brain to come up with the solution to an insoluble problem while the last seconds of Hermione's life ticked past.

With a loud _bamf_ and a flash of fire, bird and girl were back. Hermione hit the floor like a brick.

"MEDIC!" Pat bellowed, his Royal Air Force training yanking him into familiar habits. "I've got a girl down!" Doors slammed open in the hall and feet came pounding towards him; he didn't wait, but dropped to his knees to look Hermione over.

_Coo,_ said the bird, waddling forward to lay its cheek on Hermione's head, its eyes glistening with gathering tears. Pat pushed the creature away, hard. He needed to see how badly Hermione was hurt, and he didn't need some damn bird getting in the way.

He turned Hermione over carefully, giving her a quick check for obvious injuries. Judging from her gasping, raspy breathing, she'd held her breath—the instinctive reaction, and exactly the wrong thing to do in vacuum. Her lungs had clearly taken damage, possibly a full rupture, but there was no easy way to tell exactly how bad it was without equipment and training he didn't have. She was pawing clumsily at her eyes; he pulled her hands away and looked. The water in her eyes had flash-boiled away in vacuum, leaving the eyeballs dry and cracked. The inside of her nose was probably the same way.

Her body was warm, but she was shivering; a quick glance showed that her hands were badly frostbitten, the skin waxy and blackened, and the rubber soles of her trainers were frozen and cracked. With no convection to carry heat away, the vacuum on the Moon wouldn't have been cold on her exposed skin, but Mare Imbrium must have been on the dark side at the time, and the surface would have been several hundred degrees below zero. Heat had conducted out of her soles at lightning speed, freezing and cracking the rubber soles. She must have fallen from the shock and put her hands out to catch herself. Fortunately, she hadn't been there more than fifteen or twenty seconds; hopefully the shoes had protected her feet long enough that she wouldn't lose them to frostbite. There was a pretty good chance she would lose her hands, though.

People were boiling in the door. Pat looked up, his face frozen in horror. "I showed her a picture of the Moon," he said blankly. "She asked the bird if it could take her there, and it did. She's ripped up; we need to get her to a hospital, fast."

John, the head of Power Systems, nodded crisply, dropping to his knees beside them and opening up the first-aid kit he was clutching in one hand. "Alex, go call 911 and get an ambulance here," he said, voice clipped as he focused on the problem at hand. "Bill, call the base doctor and get her up here, fast. The rest of you, out. We need room." A former Sergeant Major in the Marines, he still had the habit of command; everyone jumped to obey.

The bird—Xare—was back, again trying to lay its head on Hermione's. Pat turned on it in a rage, backhanding it hard into the wall. "GET THE HELL AWAY FROM HER!" he bellowed. "This is your fault!"

_Caw!_ it challenged, mantling and disappearing in a flash of fire to reappear standing on Hermione's chest. The thing was only the size of a falcon, but the wing that it struck him with hit like a rhino and sent him tumbling. Before Pat could get back up or John could interfere, it leaned down, its tears spilling into Hermione's eyes.

Right in front of them, the damage vanished. Hermione's eyes were fixed first, the cracks disappearing and a healthy wetness taking their place. The tears continued to fall, and a few moments later her breathing evened out and she reached up, her hands stroking Xare gently. As she did, the flesh of her hands softened back into a healthy pink and the shivering stopped.

Everyone froze in shock.

Hermione sighed and sat up, hugging Xare to her chest. "Let's not do that again," she said shakily. Xare cooed apologetically and bumped her head up under Hermione's chin.

* * *

"This place is amazing," Aubrey said, looking around the immense conference room admiringly. "Not just the room, the whole castle. I think I annoyed my guide a great deal because I had to stop and talk to the portraits—and then the moving staircases and the hallway where you end up walking on what used to be the ceiling when you started out...just incredible. How long has it been here, anyway?"

Dumbledore's eyes sparkled behind the half-moon glasses. He stroked his long white beard, hiding a smile behind it. "About two weeks," he said casually.

Aubry goggled. "Two _weeks?!_" he gasped. "This place is obviously old—there's no way it's only been here two weeks."

"I assure you, two weeks," Dumbledore said gravely. "The original Hogwarts was centuries old, but it was destroyed by a nuclear bomb a short time ago. We only rebuilt it...hm." His eyes went distant for a moment as he calculated. "Fifteen days ago. So, I suppose you're right—not two weeks. It took almost a hundred of us working together for a week to do something the four Founders did overnight. Still, we finished it just fifteen days ago." The smile was now plainly visible on the old wizard's face.

Aubrey stroked the beard that spilled halfway down his chest, eyeing Dumbledore. Eventually, he nodded. "Fine," he said, accepting but still seeming nervous. "Just, please tell me this isn't the original site? If so, the radiation..."

Dumbledore's briefly looked disappointed; clearly, he'd been winding Aubrey up just a little bit and hoping for more of a reaction. "Yes, it's the original site. Don't worry, though—we got rid of the radiation. It was time-consuming, but not difficult."

Aubrey blinked. "You got rid of the radiation." He blinked again. "From a nuclear bomb."

Dumbledore smiled; this was more like it! "Yes, we did. Mr. Potter spoke to the Queen and brought in some Muggles in odd suits with..." He paused, reaching for a word. "Geiger counters. They located the areas that were afflicted with radiation. We placed ward charms around them to keep the effects contained until they could be dealt with, then we went around to each spot and Transfigured the earth to cleanse it."

Aubrey frowned. "I thought science wasn't something that wizards knew about? How did you ward against radiation if you don't know what it is?"

"It took some discussion, but eventually the Muggles were able to explain that this 'radiation' comes in two forms—solid particles and light," Dumbledore explained. "There is a combination of spells—Protego Maxima, Fianto Duri, Repello Inimicum—that create very secure shields around an area. Anything attempting to pass through the shield is disintegrated. We tested it with a geiger counter; it's quite able to destroy the particle-based forms of radiation, and a simple Invisibility charm can stop light from passing through an area in one direction; we simple ensured that the barrier side was facing in. The first few attempts didn't work because the radiation wasn't a normal form of light, but it didn't take long to create a version that stopped all forms of light."

Aubrey nodded, thinking it through. With a sudden frown, he hastily flipped open the briefing packet that he'd been clutching, and paged through to the information on Transfiguration. He ran one finger down the text until he got to the bit he'd half-remembered. "It says here that Transfiguration isn't permanent," he said accusingly. "How did turning the radioactive dirt into something else solve the problem?"

Dumbledore smiled tolerantly. "We Transfigured the affected earth into ice—we were careful to place containment charms around it first in case any of it sublimated. Fawkes and I then transported it to a volcano in Antartica. I Finited the incantation before I threw it in, of course, so the dirt melted instead of the ice evaporating. It took quite a large number of trips—as I said, time-consuming but not difficult."

Aubrey was silent, stroking his beard while staring into the distance glassy-eyed. "That's...amazing. Have you considered using this in other applications? Chernobyl, Three Mile Island...don't know how much radiation remains there, but still..."

Dumbledore nodded. "Indeed. We've had orders from the British government to aid in waste disposal from nuclear reactors. The Americans have also requested help in eliminating the contents of several of their nuclear waste repositories, and we're expecting more requests as time goes on. Now that we have established an exchange rate between Galleons and pounds sterling we are discovering that radioactive waste disposal is quite profitable; a large number of wizards and witches are setting themselves up in the business. So many, in fact, that the Ministry has had to pass emergency laws requiring that wizards and witches demonstrate minimal competence in radiation-related science before being allowed to do the job."

Aubrey nodded, stunned. "You can block all forms of radiation." He cocked his head in thought. "That's...huge. And you said the initial versions blocked some wavelengths but not others? When the light hits the surface, does it bounce off, route around, disappear—what?"

Dumbleore frowned. "I'm not really sure...I suppose we can test it somehow."

Aubrey nodded, excitement growing. "This isn't even my field, but you really need to get with some optics guys...maybe lasers..." He shook his head. "Anyway, not right now. My thing is where computers and biology intersect; I've been thinking a lot about life extension lately, and I saw something in the packet about a cloak that keeps you from dying?"

* * *

"Okay, let's try this again," Pat said, speaking carefully. "Xare, please _don't_ actually go anywhere. Just tell me: are you able to teleport with people when Hermione doesn't come along?"

The firebird bobbed her head, giving him a look that combined curiosity and patience.

"She teleported with me and about fifty other people, sir," Hermione offered. "Mostly children, but a few adults. We all needed to be in contact, but we found a spell that could connect us even if we weren't physically touching. Also, anything she's carrying gets lighter."

"Lighter, huh?" Eric asked. Having had a practical demonstration of Xare's abilities, the interview had now expanded to include most of the department heads, and the head of Payload Systems was always interested in how to reduce weight. "How much can she carry?"

The bird looked at him, looked at Hermione, and seemed to sigh. _Caw!_ she said.

Hermione smiled and scratched Xare's breast feathers. "I know, but if the mission is to take humanity to the stars—or even just the Moon—then we need to answer the questions first."

_Caw!_ The sound was almost grumpy. Pat could almost understand it himself—_why can't we just _go? _I'll take you right now!_

"It would be nice if it were that easy," John said gruffly. "What would we do if you weren't there? We need to be able to do this on our own, even if you aren't available."

Xare gave an irritable huff. Spreading her wings just slightly, she hopped from Hermione's shoulder to John's desk. The thing was institutional metal and the drawers were loaded with paper files—John _used_ electronic storage, but he _preferred_ to look at paper instead of a screen. It weighed easily several hundred pounds; Xare sank her claws into the edge and flapped, rising into the air and hovering with the desk effortlessly suspended below her. She looked at them calmly for a moment, then disappeared, reappearing on the other side of the room with a smug look on her avian face and the desk still suspended in her claws like it weighed no more than a feather. One more teleport and she returned the desk to its original spot.

"Wow. That's going to simplify launch," Mark said, goggle-eyed. The head of Launch Control, he believed in the dream too much to worry about the fact that both he and his entire department had just been made largely redundant.

"Okay," Pat said slowly, his brain ticking along. "So, she can teleport to the moon, she can bring a huge number of people and cargo along...we just need some life support. How would a suit handle being teleported? Or maybe we put together a vehicle?"

"Speaking of vehicles, could we use her to deploy a re-supply a space station? Because I've been thinking about O'Neill wheels..."

"Not a good plan," John said, shooting him a glance. "Even if she could deploy it, you wouldn't want her resupplying it. See that flash of fire when she emerges? It would do bad things to anything she came out next to, and it would use up a bunch of the oxygen."

"How do you know?" Eric demanded. "She's on fire right now, but she's not burning anything."

John glared back. "Fire still needs oxygen, you—"

"Aaand we're breathing," Mark said, interrupting quickly before the two could really get started on the latest round of their feud. "We're all calm, rational adults. So, we can do tests to see if the fire is dangerous. Xare says she can transfer with people other than Hermione, so we should be able to send astronauts up—"

_Caaaaaw!_ Xare said, glaring at Mark.

"I'm sorry sir, but I don't think she's willing," Hermione said, embarrassed. "She says that she's _able_ to, but that I'm her person. I think she wouldn't mind doing it occasionally, or in an emergency, but I don't think she wants to make it a regular thing."

They all looked at her, looked at the bird, and sighed in perfect sync.

"Lovely," John growled. "All right, we can cut a suit down easily enough, but we'll still want a vehicle. I'm not letting anyone send a young girl into space with nothing but a suit." The others nodded in perfect agreement.

* * *

"Is this right?" Nancy asked, tapping a finger on the page of the briefing packet that she'd shuffled to the top. "You can make a potion that grants perfect luck?" She carefully kept the growl out of her voice; Slughorn was a tidy, fat little package of everything she disliked—smug, smooth in an oily way, clearly out for himself, and probably a lying weasel—but she'd work with a used car salesman if it could do what this man apparently could, and she knew enough not to irritate a potential co-author...or, in this case, potion supplier.

He nodded in that irritatingly smug way. "Indeed," he said with a pleased smile. "Although the stuff doesn't just _make_ luck, it only concentrates it. Whatever good luck it gives you, you'll have an equal amount of bad luck after it wears off." He smiled slyly, taking a sip of his tea before continuing. "It's also quite difficult to brew, however. I am, if I may say so, the only one to successfully manage the trick in twenty years. I daresay there's no one else right now who can do it."

She nodded crisply. "I looked it up," she said, waving vaguely at the giant wall of books. "Didn't seem terribly complicated; takes six months, but the directions seem straightforward. What's so hard about it?"

"It's very sensitive," he said calmly. "You'll ruin it if you do anything even slightly wrong—get it the tiniest bit too hot or too cold, wave your wand in a figure eight that isn't completely flat, or that doesn't completely close, or that overlaps itself at all. Everything needs to go exactly right, or you end up with something that looks and smells exactly like Liquid Luck but is in fact incredibly toxic." He smiled. "And, before you ask, if you're under the effects of Liquid Luck when you try to brew Liquid Luck...bad things happen. It was invented by Zygmunt Budge in June of 1594; in May of 1595, Bartomias Bettleborough tried to use a small amount to make a larger batch. He lived in a small town at the foot of a mountain a bit east of Pereira, Colombia; the town isn't there anymore."

"Hm," she said, narrowing her eyes. "You do this in a _cauldron,_ right? Big heavy metal thing, probably cast iron? Not necessarily uniform thickness or metal quality? And you heat it over a fire made with wood, right? When you say 'tiniest bit' too hot or too cold it can't really be _that_ precise. I would imagine your average chemist could do rather better."

He chuckled and sipped his ridiculously expensive Scotch. "You and your chemists are certainly welcome to try, my dear. I doubt you've be successful without a wand, though."

"Hmph." She pondered for a minute. "Does it need a powerful wizard? _Are_ some wizards stronger than others, or do they just know more?"

He took another sip of the tea, then paused and studied the mug. "You know, when Mr. Potter approached me about coming to this event and answering questions, I must admit that I wasn't terribly keen on the idea. He was, however, quite persuasive." He swirled the tea thoughtfully, not looking up. "I didn't expect there to be quite so _many_ questions, though."

Nancy Keller was, by choice, bluff and direct to the point of rudeness. Despite that, she hadn't made it in academia without learning to follow subtext or play the political game. She painted a smile on her face and forced a rueful laugh. "Ah, I'm sorry, Professor. It's just so fascinating, you know? So many new things to learn, and I find potion-making especially fascinating, since it ties in so well with my own work. Tell me, what got you interested in it?"

She kept the smile on her face and the sigh inaudible while she waited for the old blowhard to get enough of listening to his own voice that they could get back to productive work. Meanwhile, she allowed her thoughts to wander to ways of automating some of this apparently complicated process. A lot of what she did relied on taking samples until you happened to get a viable gene string; if you could cheat, and make yourself so lucky that you _always_ got a viable string on the first try...well now.

* * *

"So, you can actually bring dead people back and talk to them?" Alexi asked with carefully curbed excitement. "Can you bring _anyone_ back?"

Harry nodded. "Yes. Whoever is operating the stone needs to have a personal connection with the spirit they want to bring back, so it's generally not practical to bring back anyone who died more than a few decades ago. Aside from that, yes. Anyone."

"Boize moi," Alexi murmured, his eyes fogging over in shock. After a moment he looked back at Harry with eager intent. "Einstein? Hilbert? Volterra? Hardy? Von Neuman? Rutherford?" His voice dropped to a reverent whisper. "Erdös?"

Harry chuckled. "Yes, sir. You're actually the third person to ask me about this today. Apparently the opportunity to gain an Erdös number of one is rather exciting. Be aware, though, that spirits know everything they knew in life but they can't change their minds about anything. Also, they learn rather slowly."

Alexi nodded, ignoring the warnings because he was too excited to speak, much less pay attention.

* * *

"No, I'm not joking," David growled. "This isn't a prank, my son legitimately has a phoenix, just like that girl in the news. I've already seen it tele—hello? Hello?"

With a snarl, he slammed the phone down and glared at it as though it were personally responsible for his frustration.

"No luck, Dad?" Joel asked quietly from the wing-backed armchair beside him. Peri was perched on the back of the chair, head cocked in consideration.

David rubbed his face. "No," he sighed. "Every number at NASA I could find and our Senator—apparently they've all been getting a lot of prank calls."

_Caw!_ Peri cried, mantling fiercely. _Go! Protect! Exalt! Bring all our brethren to the stars!_ rang the echo of the bird's call, bouncing through the depths of their souls.

"Peri, we _want_ to, we just don't know _how_," Joel said, his voice pained. "I know that if we could just get to someone with the power to move things, we could make it work, but I don't know...who..." He trailed off, staring into space for a minute.

"Got an idea?" his father asked. He felt the bird's cry himself; it drove him to succeed, to do whatever it took, without question or concern for the cost. He was eager to answer the call, but the only idea he had left was to put them in the car and drive to Congressional Hill directly. It was thirteen hours, and he'd need to call in sick to work for at least two days, which could cause him problems—he was out of sick days after a bad round of pneumonia earlier in the year—but the call of a phoenix made it seem a trivial sacrifice.

"Well...what about President Bush?" Joel said slowly.

David winced; if only the phoenix had come in just a few more months! Of all the Presidents to have in office at a time like this...

"He could get us whatever we need, right Dad? And Peri could take us directly to him!"

The bird shook its head regretfully. _Caw,_ it said.

Joel's face fell. "Oh. Only places and people that I've seen? Okay."

David frowned; as much as he could wish that the office were held by anyone else, the President really could open all the needed doors. "Do you need to have seen them _personally?_" he asked. "If you've just seen them on TV, would that be enough?"

Peri stared at him, first with one eye, then with the other. The expression of non-comprehension came through clearly.

Joel, on the other hand, was already running for the remote and turning the channel to C-SPAN.

* * *

"So, Professor," Robert began. "Aubrey was telling me that you built this entire castle in a week?"

Dumbledore nodded. "Indeed. It needed a hundred of the top wizards in the world—quite expensive, convincing them all to drop what they were doing for a week and Apparate over to participate in such an enormous ritual. Still, the Ministry was willing to pay." He chuckled and sipped on his pumpkin juice. "Honestly, I believe that the reason they were so excited to unknot the purse strings was because the ruin of Hogwarts was a reminder of just how badly you Muggles hurt us during the fighting. Too many wizards are still having trouble getting used to the idea that Muggle society is as advanced, or even more advanced, than our own."

Robert nodded. "Indeed. If you don't mind me asking, exactly how much did it cost?"

"Hm," Dumbledore said, frowning in thought. "I wasn't party to the negotiations, but I believe it was on the order of seven thousand Galleons for each of the other wizards—Sergei was crowing about getting paid a thousand a day."

"So, seven million Galleons, total," Robert said, frowning. "Thirty-five million dollars..." He went quiet for a moment, thinking. When he looked up his smile was wide and avaricious. "Professor Dumbledore, I believe there might be a few Muggles who would be interested in an enormous magical castle containing, among other things, a room that can be whatever they want it to be. Do you suppose that I could hire you and those other wizards for...say, one hundred thousand Galleons each?"

Dumbledore's eyebrows rose. "I thought you were here for the symposium?" he asked. "Aren't you a...'geneticist', I believe was the word?"

"Screw genetics," Robert said with fervor. "I suddenly have a hankering for real estate!"

* * *

_**Author's Note:**__ I'm using the HPMOR exchange rate of 50 GBP to the Galleon instead of the canon 5:1. _

_In other news, this chapter was a pain in the neck to write, because I kept having to remind myself that it's set in 1992. There's no cell phones for the Space Agency folks to be using to call an ambulance, there's no ISS for Xare to endanger the oxygen of, there's no Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository for the wizards to be cleaning up, there's no Cire Perdue for Slughorn to be sipping in order to show off his wealth, and there's no YouTube for Joel and David to be looking for pictures of the Oval Office on. Oh, and Aubrey de Grey was still working on a fruit-fly database instead of techniques for human rejuvenation. Meh; at that point in his career he likely wouldn't have been invited to the symposium, but he was my first contact with the idea of real-world rejuvenation and life extension, so he needed to be there._

* * *

_**Author's Footnote:**__ I have a mailing list! It can be found at __** /dks-list**__ (That's __**bit. do /dks-list**__ for those of you reading on a site/device that eats links.) There is one email every two weeks, and each one includes links to new postings as well as bonus material not available on the web—world history, character studies, deleted scenes, etc. _

_Also, I have other stories for sale! You can find them on Amazon. (bit. do/dks-amazon-books, if you are dealing with a link-eater.)_


	4. Chapter 4

Caitlin Cross arrived at the Symposium, flipped through her briefing packet, and asked to be shown to a potions lab before she'd even gone to the initial meeting. Fortunately, the lab came equipped with several seventh-year students to provide guidance and a plentiful supply of most of the listed potions to provide raw materials.

Obvious experiments being obvious, she used one of the knives to clip a few hairs out of her pony tail and dropped them into some of the raw Polyjuice stock. She waited, observing carefully until it finished transforming into something that looked rather like grape juice but smelled like Coca-Cola. Only when her seventh-year lab assistant assured her that the stuff was ready did she sterilize the knife and make a small cut on her hand. Sure enough, after chugging down the grape-Coke, the cut was gone.

In the notepad that she kept in her hip pocket she wrote: PJuice turns u 2 state when gave hair. Hm, state or condition? reset age? Heals. Myb 4 firemen/diver/hi-risks? Gv hr b4 risk, take PJ if hurt. Temp only - need dr when wears off. Eliminates bends? Puts air back in lungs of drowner? any issue w/long term? gen much hair 25, drink 4ever, stay young?

Turning to her assigned seventh year, she demanded, "Will this stuff fix brain damage? Or regrow limbs? Does it clear out fatigue poisons? How about food-if you just had a big meal when you give the hair, are you full again when you drink the juice? How about-"

The student's eyes started to get a little frantic as the questions poured out.

o-o-o-o

Brenda sighed; back at the Symposium with all the wizard experts around to explain things, this magic stuff had seemed much clearer. Now that she was actually coming to grips with it in the field...not so much.

For the ninth time she had carefully crushed her Flitterby Moth into pulp, carefully added it to the cauldron, and carefully stirred it clockwise. For the ninth time, it had entirely failed to turn green, much less the later red and orange states.

"Was I stirring too far on the outside again?" she asked hopefully. "Or...maybe it wasn't fast enough?"

Her teacher shook his head. "I'm sorry, my dear," he said sadly. "As far as I could see, you did everything exactly right." He paused, then hurried on with clear intent to be encouraging. "I must say, I wish all my students were so dedicated! You've learned much more quickly than any of my first years!"

Brenda slumped. Damnit. It had seemed like such a good idea-Muggles couldn't cast spells with a wand, but surely they could make potions? At least the simple potions, the ones that didn't involve wand work. After all, potions were basically just cooking, right? Only waaaay more useful. The Pepper Up Potion was a perfect example-it cured the common cold! Sure, it made steam shoot out your ears for a few hours, but who the hell cared? If you could modify it into something that cured malaria and make it in industrial batches it could save tens of millions of lives...but there weren't enough wizards to produce that much that with normal procedures, and the line of experiments she was running were leaning pretty strongly towards the 'Muggles can't brew potions' camp, which meant that automation wouldn't work.

She wondered idly if the problem could be the equipment, or perhaps the teacher? Malinmort Pennybristle was a ridiculous name for a ridiculous man; he spoke with a nasal precision that sounded less like a British accent and more like an American stereotype of a British accent. His hat was an enormous puce puffball with a green yarn fringe, he was thin as a scarecrow, he wore a paisley longcoat, and his shoes looked like he'd stolen them from backstage at a clown show. Despite all that, he was an accredited potions master, albeit at a third-rate school in Dover, and the equipment and ingredients were all brought directly from his classroom. He'd already demonstrated that he could use them to produce a Pompion potion that would successfully turn a rat's head into a pumpkin for a few hours.

"Hmph." She glowered at the stupid cauldron and its completely non-green contents. "This is irritating. The cauldron doesn't matter; you can make a potion in a cauldron or an Erlenmeyer flask, although I can't do it in either. You can make potions using ingredients that I prepared. You can make potions using ingredients that I both prepare and add. I can't prepare potions even if you prepare and add the ingredients and I just do the stirring. So, it comes from...the stirring? Really?"

"I'm terribly sorry, my dear," he said. "I did warn you. Without a magical presence, I don't think it's possible for you to perform magic, even something like potion-making that doesn't require a wand."

She sighed. Magic was just so aggravating! Powerful, clearly functional, fascinating, but more aggravating than first year students!

"All right, there's one more thing I want to try," she said. "I'll hold the spoon, but you move my hand in the correct pattern, all right? Don't touch the spoon, though. I want to see if magic is conductive. Oh, and you'll need to prepare and add the ingredients as well; I want to keep this to one variable."

When they'd started working together, she'd spent a good ninety minutes trying to explain the scientific method to him. He'd paid attention, nodded at all the right parts, and then at the end he'd asked "Now, these variables that you're putting through the trials-does it matter if they're wild, or will farm-raised ones work?" She'd had to look at him for a minute to see if he was messing with her; he wasn't. Eventually she decided it was a better use of time to just black-box the whole thing; he had no problem doing whatever crazy thing she wanted as long as he got paid. Come to that, his time was costing her lab out the wazoo, so it was better not to waste any of it trying to cram four hundred years of scientific discovery into a brain that was, in many respects, from a medieval society-and wasn't that just a charming thought? A bunch of enormously powerful physics-breaking wizards who still believed in feudalism.

He listened to the directions, shrugged, Vanished the contents of her cauldron, and happily prepped another batch of Bouncing Bulb, foxglove, and Flitterby Moth. (She'd been terribly embarrassed when she'd accidentally called it 'Fluttershy' in the beginning; fortunately he didn't get the reference.). Once everything was ready, he took her right hand in his and stirred as he dropped ingredients in with his left. She locked her eyes on how he was stirring, determined to engrave every motion on her brain so she could reproduce them perfectly.

Fifteen seconds later, she had a cast iron pot full of water, plants, and some mooshed-up bugs. There was nary a trace of green anywhere, much less red or orange.

"Huh," she said, staring at the cauldron. "Have to admit, I thought that would work. Okay, one more: this time, you hold the spoon and I'll stir."

One more Vanishment, preparation, and experiment. She reproduced the pattern of his stirring as exactly as she could manage and...voila. An orange potion.

"Goddamit," she said in disgust. "Really? As long as you're holding the the spoon, that's enough?"

As it turned out, he didn't even need to be holding it. Pinching it between the very ends of two fingertips was fine. In fact, any sort of physical connection was sufficient so long as it would allow him to, in theory, stir with proper energy and control. He could stir the potion with a spoon, a ruler, or a spoon taped to a ruler. He could not stir it with a piece of thread, or a spoon taped to a piece of thread. It didn't matter if she was the one actually causing the motion. It didn't even matter if his hand was completely still, as long as he could have stirred the potion in theory. When she experimented with a plumb bob on the end of a long-handled spoon she discovered that it didn't even matter if an inanimate object was causing the motion. It just mattered that he was physically touching the object being used to stir, and had a solid enough connection that he could have caused the stirring had he desired.

"Thank you, Professor," she said. "I need to go write all this up and figure out the next round of experiments. Could we meet again next month-say, on the third?"

"Of course, my dear," he said with a bright smile. "It was a great pleasure; I'll look forward to doing more of these experiments of yours-I haven't worked on potion discovery since my thesis, it was good fun to get back to it."

She opened her mouth to object that they weren't trying to discover new potions, they were trying to discover the rules behind potion-making...and then closed it again. Right, feudal brain. Instead of arguing she just politely agreed and ushered him out before dropping into her desk chair and turning on the word processor. _Observations on the Principles for Preparation of Alchemical Substances by non-Wizards_ had a nice ring to it.

o-o-o-o

"Good afternoon, Doctor de Gray," Harry said as he walked in. "Do you have a moment? I was hoping to hear how the experiments with troll blood were going."

"Harry, I told you you can call me Aubrey," he said. "The guy who gets the grant gets to skip the 'Doctor'. Grab a seat. And, to answer your question, the experiments are...going. Initial results were positive; add troll blood to a mouse and it starts spontaneously regenerating, even from limb removal."

"I take it they didn't remain positive?" the young man asked.

Aubrey shook his head. "Nope. After a few hours the mouse spontaneously develops cancer pretty much throughout its body and usually needs to be euthanized the next day. We're working on it.

"We've been kicking around some other ideas, though. I was reading through the Journal of Cryptozoology about the latest studies on unicorns and dragons. Neither of them seem to have a natural end to their lifespan, and I saw something about this Voldemort guy partially resurrecting himself by drinking unicorn blood. Is that true? I can't tell with this wizarding stuff what's real and what's a joke."

Harry nodded. "Yes, that was real. It did bad things to him, though-he was basically possessing Professor Quirrell, and he couldn't hold the possession full time. He would periodically lose control and the body would go into this zombie state. And it didn't work indefinitely-he told me that he would have eventually died anyway."

Aubrey blinked. "He told you? When?"

"Day before yesterday," Harry said. "The unicorn blood was actually the reason I came by; I thought it might make a good stabilizer for the troll blood. Looks like you already thought of it, though."

"Day before yesterday. Didn't he die…a while ago?" Aubrey asked faintly.

Harry nodded and pulled a stone from inside thin air next to his belt. "This is the Resurrection Stone," he explained. "It can be used to recall any spirit that you've got a close connection to." He saw Aubrey's mouth opening and beat him to it. "And yes, that could include Doctor Erdös, if we had someone who knew him well."

Aubrey stared off into space for a long minute.

"Huh," he said.

Aubrey stared off into space for another long minute.

"Huh," he said again. He shook himself, coming back into focus. "Okay, for now I'm going to ignore the apparent existence of a hyperspace pocket near your belt, not to mention this whole 'speaking to the dead' thing and the implications of life after death, resurrection, and the possibility of an actual God. Let's just finish the bit about unicorns, dragons, and trolls, and then I'll have about a sagan questions for you. Now, the obvious thing to me is if we can get some unicorn blood that doesn't have those side effects. The bit that I read made it sound like it was killing the unicorn that was the problem, not drinking the blood. So, I was wondering…"

o-o-o-o

A small steel ball hurled through the void; the far gone railgun that had sent it blasting up through the sky and out into space had given it more speed than any bullet mankind had ever invented, yet it barely seemed to move against the backdrop of the stars.

A flash of fire next to the ball and the void was no longer empty; the ball hurtled on, uncaring.

Like the Titan he was named for, Hyperion the phoenix wasn't bothered by little things like vacuum or sleeting radiation. His person, on the other hand, was much squishier, so Joel was thoroughly swaddled in the best spacesuit that NASA could create.

He felt himself burn up from the noisy cargo room at Kennedy, and he felt himself burn down somewhere so silent that he could hear the blood in his veins. He kept his eyes tightly closed while taking several deep breaths. It hadn't gotten any easier with repetition, but at least he'd gotten faster so he wouldn't have to be here as long. One more deep breath and he made himself open his eyes.

The universe fell away in front of him, sending him tumbling head-over-heels down a bottomless black shaft with tiny lights in the walls. Everything was silent except for his own breathing and blood, which served only to remind him of what would happen if his suit ruptured-it would be what Peri had shown him the night he came: eyes freezing, cold vacuum sucking the air out of his lungs and burning them like ice cream too long in the freezer. He wouldn't explode, of course-that was just sloppy research on the part of Hollywood. No, instead he would freeze solid and tumble endlessly through cold blackness until all the stars burned out and every last proton in the universe decayed….

He locked his eyes on the satellite under his hand and fought the panic attack down. Peri leaned down and rubbed his head along Joel's fishbowl helmet, but it didn't help much. The phoenix couldn't sing in vacuum and he couldn't touch Joel through the suit, but at least he was there, another living presence in the vast lonely emptiness.

The satellite was designed to be easy to set up: unfold the solar panel 'wings', check that they were locked, push the button to do a diagnostic, wait while the computer ran a starchart match and verified that it knew its location. If the green light came on he was cleared to return home. If the red light came on he should re-check the wings and re-run the diagnostic. If it came up red again, bring the thing home. No matter what, he'd be burning home in no more than four minutes, even with the time necessary to pick up the railgun bullet.

The diagnostic and starchart matching took just under a minute. He'd done this three times a week for the last four months, and each time had been the longest minute of Joel's life. Lockheed was ramping up production on the satellites; soon he would be deploying one every day, then two, and eventually they had talked about the possibility of lobbing fifty per day. The astronomers wanted as many nodes as they could get in order to increase the resolution on their Space-based Very Long Baseline Array. One of them had excitedly told him that they'd be able to view exoplanets with newspaper-reading resolution, once Joel had deployed "just a few thousand" nodes. He'd nearly thrown up on the man's shoes.

The green light finally came on. He sighed with relief and tapped Peri; again they burned up, and then burned down floating alongside a small steel ball with the number "193" etched on the side. It seemed odd to him that they needed to recover this particular bullet, but he hadn't cared enough to ask; he'd been too focused on the fact that it would mean another half-minute or so floating in blackness.

Joel reached out and picked the ball up, then took a deep breath. This was the hard part; he needed to seem calm and excited when they burned back. If the people at NASA knew about his rapidly-developing agoraphobia they'd never let him go out again, and humanity would stay trapped on Earth. A few more years, a few more nodes in the Array and they'd be able to see exoplanets in enough detail that he and Peri could burn there. At that point he'd never have to be in free space again. He just needed to keep it together until then.

When he finally felt like he wasn't going to throw up in the next few seconds, he tapped Peri on the shoulder to signal readiness. They burned back to the safe solidity of Mother Terra, Joel still clutching the railgun bullet that had been their location marker for the satellite deployment.

o-o-o-o

Wizards were suddenly the most desired Guests of Honor at conferences around the world; they were generally mobbed, so Ben was quick to buttonhole Mrs Dilby when he saw her standing briefly alone in the con suite.

"Hi Mrs Dilby," he said. "Quick question for you, if I may: the potion recipes that I've seen have all been designed for small batches-a handful of this, a pinch of that. Is there any reason they couldn't be scaled up? Could you make a few thousand gallons at a time if you multiplied the ingredients but kept the proper ratios?"

"I'm afraid I don't know," she said. She looked less like a nigh-omnipotent defier of common sense and more like a soccer mom: comfortably middle aged and a bit stout, her hair still nut brown with just a fleck or two of gray, and smile lines etched into her face. For whatever reason, she made Ben think of his Nana pulling trays of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven.

"I explained to the conference organizers that I'm just a housewitch," she said. "I did quite well on my N.E. , but I haven't done any actual research. They didn't seem to mind, though." She thought about it for a moment, then added. "We did make larger or smaller batches for the N.E. , actually, although nothing like what you're talking about. Still, I can't think of any reason you couldn't do it...although what you would want a thousand gallons of potion for, I'm not sure. And it would be very expensive; every potion depends on some magical ingredient and there aren't that many unicorns, dragons, mandrakes, or whatever around."

Ben blinked. "So, it's a question of scarcity?" he asked. "If you had enough of those ingredients, you could make as much Pepper Up or whatever as you wanted?"

She nodded. "I expect so. You really should check it with an actual potions master though."

He smiled and seized her hand, pumping it up and down. "Thank you so much, Mrs Dilby. You've been extremely helpful!" With a final slightly crazed smile he rushed off, digging his cell out of his pocket. as he went.

"Hi, Dad, listen, are you still on the board of that biotech firm? I need to confirm a couple things, but if I'm right there's a goldmine just sitting here, and we'll need to move fast before someone else grabs it. Get your lawyers on the phone and tell them to start prepping some patent forms and option assignments. I'll take thirty percent equity and arrange all the necessary personnel and resources, in the meantime, tell your team to buy up all the cloning equipment they need for mass production of both animals and plants."

"Damnit," Charles (never 'Chuck', thank you) snarled, throwing his pen down in disgust. "The things have cells and there _is_ DNA in them, so why can't we get a clean sample?"

"Try this," Ben said, holding out a tiny bottle full of a golden liquid. "It's a potion called Liquid Luck; you take it and everything goes right for you. This is enough for twelve hours, but be really careful with it; this little bit cost two million dollars, it takes six months to make, and there's only one guy who can do it."

Charles took the flask gingerly and held it up to the light, examining it from all angles before poking gently at the glass stopper. "If it's this valuable, why in the world were they stupid enough to put it in a container shaped like an upside-down teardrop?" he asked. "With a stopper that doesn't fit any tighter than a perfume bottle?"

Ben shrugged. "Wizards." It had become the universal answer to 'why is [stupid thing related to magic] the way it is?'

Charles sighed in disgust. "Any side effects I should know about?" he asked. "Steam from the ears, nose hair growing to my feet?"

Ben hesitated. "Slughorn said that it didn't create luck, it just concentrated it. However much good luck it gives you, you'll have an equal amount of bad luck later, and the bad luck will often last longer because it's being pulled from across a long stretch of time to concentrate in that one short stretch where you're using the potion."

Charles frowned. "Hm." He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. Pulling out the stopper, he touched it to his tongue, handed it back to Ben, and picked up the deck of cards he kept on his desk as a fiddle-toy. Hands moving with practiced ease, he shuffled once and then dealt four bridge hands. When he flipped them over it was to reveal one hand of spades, one of hearts, one of diamonds, and one of clubs. Charles's hand was spades, and in all four cases the cards were arranged by number with the high cards on the right.

"Well, it works," he said. He gestured at the carefully-preserved unicorn tissue samples on the table and said "I'm going to wait and see what the fallout is from dealing bridge hands before I try to select one group of viable cells from billions of non-viable ones."

Ben grimaced at the delay, but couldn't argue.

o-o-o-o

_Experimental Protocols for Safe Usage of Felix Felicis in Cryptozoological Cloning _became the most-referenced paper of 1995. It was sixty-seven pages long, most of it focusing on the details of the cloning process. All the bits related to the protocols-in other words, the bits that anyone actually cared about-could be summed up in a few short lines:

1\. Have an expendable lab assistant drink the stuff; a viable blastocyst is not worth a divorce, house fire, car accident, and false arrest for pedophilia.

2\. People dying of terminal cancer are a good choice for expendable lab assistants; try offering money to their surviving family in exchange for their help.

3\. Death row inmates are not a good choice for expendable lab assistants.

4\. Ferchrissake, if you absolutely must use death row inmates, don't give them more than you absolutely need to; it turns out that enough luck causes manacles to fall off and guards to spontaneously develop narcolepsy.

5\. Whomever you get, train them carefully on what you want them to do _before_ you give them the Luck; you want to reduce the amount of luck they need so that they can hopefully survive the backlash.

6\. Be absolutely certain your expendable lab assistants haven't already used the stuff in the past twelve months, as the fallout can trash your lab.

7\. Once they've done whatever you needed them for, get them the hell out of your lab and don't let them within three kilometers of it for at least a fortnight.

8\. After using them to succeed at low-probability tasks, tell them to buy a ton of lottery tickets in order to bleed off some of the bad luck. It probably won't actually save them, but it will reduce the collateral damage.

Everyone referencing it was doing so for those few lines; the fact that Professor Davidson's lab had successfully cloned a unicorn was pretty much missed in the furor.

o-o-o-o

"It's a fascinating offer," Slughorn said politely. "However, I'm afraid I must decline. Felix Felicis is my most profitable product; I'm not interested in ruining my own monopoly"

Elon leaned back in his chair, carefully projecting 'relaxed and affable.' "Professor, you haven't heard my offer yet," he said.

"I'm afraid it really doesn't matter," Slughorn said. "I'm flattered by your interest, but there's simply nothing that would be worth giving up such a valuable sec-"

"Fifty million Galleons," Elon said calmly.

Slughorn blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"I'm offering you fifty million Galleons," Elon said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. "Twenty thousand just for coming down and letting us do the filming, the rest if your information allows us to make a successful production batch within two years. In addition, I'll throw in one half percent of all net proceeds derived from the product for the next ten years. Plus, if we succeed in the production batch I'll give you my personal phone number and those of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and President Clinton."

Slughorn leaned back in his chair, looking poleaxed. "I...ah…" He stopped, took a deep breath, and continued more steadily. "I would need appropriate paperwork, of course. And evidence that you really can provide what you claim; it seems a bit farfetched."

Elon nodded and reached into his expensive leather briefcase. It had cost a month's rent that he couldn't really afford, but it was necessary for the illusion.

"Here you are," he said, handing over a sheaf of paper. "This isn't the final contract, just a letter of intent. It simply says that, contingent on appropriate legal agreements, you will make a good faith effort to help us create a process for the industrial production of Felix Felicis in exchange for the remuneration I've already mentioned. If you sign it, I'll have a few of my lawyers come by in order to work out the details to your satisfaction. You'll note that I've already signed; I'm committed to this venture if you are."

Slughorn picked up the paper, read it carefully, checked to make sure that both copies were identical, and then flicked his wand to summon an inkwell and quill so that he could scrawl his signature at the bottom.

"Excellent," Elon said, collecting one of the copies with studied casualness. "I'll have my lawyers owl you some suggested times within the next couple of weeks. I look forward to working with you, Professor." He shook Slughorn's hand firmly, strode out the door, and hopped in the back of the rented limousine.

He'd have to hurry if he was going to make his plane, and there was a lot to do on the way. It was a long flight back to America's west coast, but Sand Hill Road was probably the only place he'd be able to get his hands on a few million pounds quickly enough to live up to his end of the deal. In the meantime, he needed to hire some lawyers. And he should probably call Stanford and tell the Registrar that he was dropping out. After that he needed to figure out how he was going to get personal phone numbers for Steve and the two Bills..

o-o-o-o

"Could you explain that again, please?" Horace said. Ever since the Statute of Secrecy had collapsed, he'd been trying to get his head around all this Muggle science. Chemistry was fascinating, as were physics and mathematics; in preparation for today's experiment he'd done enough reading to understand the concept and basic mechanisms of video cameras and the other equipment he saw. Despite all that, he couldn't for the life of him understand why they wanted him to wear something as ridiculous as this.

"We'd like you to wear this motion capture suit," Susan told him, smiling brightly. "It'll allow us to record your movements very precisely so that we can study them later."

Susan had been introduced as a 'program manager', but that was clearly hogwash. Program manager, as he understood it, was a position of responsibility; it was very unlikely that a...twenty-one? twenty-two? year old girl would have the job. It was even less likely that she'd be doing the job while wearing three-inch heels, carefully-applied makeup, perfume, and a labcoat with three undone buttons. No, she was clearly a handler here to keep him at ease and cooperative.

Non-Slytherins were so cute when they tried to be manipulative.

Still, he wasn't complaining; she was easy on the eyes and seemed smart enough that she'd be an engaging conversationalist. In fact, he was impressed by this whole setup-given that Mr Musk wasn't much older than this girl, Horace had been pretty certain that he was offering things he couldn't deliver. The fact that he'd said his lawyers would owl 'within the next few weeks' was the clincher-if Musk really were what he claimed to be, he would have been champing at the bit to tie things down as quickly as possible.

Still, the ability to make Felix in large quantities would be priceless beyond measure; it was reasonable to believe that, with that letter of intent in hand, Musk would be able to secure the funding he needed, so Horace had decided to take a flyer on the boy. Sure enough, the paperwork had come through. He'd hired his own Muggle solicitors to go over it and they'd assured him that it was ironclad, so he'd signed. And here he was.

'Here' was a Muggle chemistry lab, all the equipment removed to make room for the dozens of cameras and instruments that were set up to record every facet of how he brewed Felix Felicis. When he arrived, they'd been finishing their investigation of the cauldron that he'd provided; they'd measured its thickness with a micrometer, taken multiple samples of the metal, and attached sensors all over its surface. The ingredients and tools had received similar levels of intent study. And apparently he himself would be subjected to equal scrutiny.

Horace looked at the skintight green suit with the ping-pong balls sewn to it, and then looked at the cameras. With a sigh he asked, "Do you have somewhere that I can change?"

o-o-o-o

"Hi Harry," Aubrey said, glancing up from his microscope as his young patron arrived. "I'm sure you're here about the unicorn blood, so let me save you the question-bad news first. Unicorn blood causes behavior changes, making the mouse alternate randomly between aggressive, lethargic, and depressive. It also dies in about eighteen hours, but there's no physical cause that we can identify. Good news: when we give unicorn blood to a mouse with troll blood in its system, the cancer doesn't appear before the unicorn blood kills the mouse, but the mouse still retains the regeneration effects of the troll blood.

"I'm still holding out hope that unicorn blood that wasn't taken by force won't have the negative effects. Any luck with the Queen?"

Harry shook his head. "Not yet, but I'm still working on it. Dumbledore's on my side, and he's trying to convince Hagrid. Hagrid's thick as a brick, but he's the best magical-animal handler Dumbledore knows of, and he's apparently good with unicorns. If we can get him to agree to be the caretaker of the herd and to only bring in ones who are willing to give a little blood to help, then maybe we can make it work."

"Okay. Well, keep working on it. Let me show you the data, I think you'll be interested."

o-o-o-o

"Good evening, I'm Peter Jennings and you're watching ABC World News Tonight. Tonight's top story: Elon Musk, the world's newest and youngest billionaire, has just confirmed success at producing a thousand gallons of the 'Liquid Luck' formula.

"Liquid Luck, also known as Felix Felicis, provides the user with supernaturally good luck for a short time, enabling success in very unlikely projects. This is then followed by an equal amount of bad luck; the amount of bad luck the user receives after performing extremely unlikely scientific procedures is frequently lethal, causing a widespread and heated discussion among ethicists and lawmakers.

"Until recently, the formula was considered too advanced to be produced by any but Britain's Professor Horace Slughorn, widely regarded as the most gifted alchemist in the world. As with most advanced alchemical preparations, it's necessary for a wizard to use their wand during production; the complex wand movements have, until now, been the primary barrier to production by the general wizarding population. Last year, Musk patented a process for controlling a wizard's hand and arm movements using a robotic sleeve. Early this year he successfully applied the process to automate the successful brewing of Liquid Luck by any wizarding individual, even young school children.

"The formula requires six months to brew, but Musk announced today that there would be no more for at least two years, as the team was forced to use up most of the world's supply of commercially available occamy eggs to produce this batch. Occamies are a rare and aggressive bird native to India and the Far East, and no breeding or conservation program has been successful to date. Musk is currently in talks with the Oxford genetics team who last year managed to clone a unicorn and successfully bring it to term.

"At a press conference earlier today, Musk announced intent to begin work on electric cars and inexpensive rockets. When asked why such niche fields, Musk replied…."

o-o-o-o

"Good news, Aubrey," Harry said with a smile. "I finally got the Queen to sign off on a herd of unicorns for experimental purposes. Hagrid's out trying to find unicorns who are willing to donate blood every fortnight or so in exchange for good care."

Aubrey's smile lit up his aquiline face. "Excellent! Any idea when we can get the first samples?"

Harry shrugged. "It depends on Hagrid, really. I had a thought, though-you saw that article about how Professor Davidson cloned a unicorn, right? Suppose we could get the blood from unborn unicorns, early enough that they don't have a fully developed brain-if they aren't sentient yet, they can't object and it wouldn't hurt them, so would that count as a willing donation? If not, maybe we could produce unicorn blood ourselves, from unicorn stem cells."

Aubrey raised an eyebrow in interest. "Hm. That's assuming that unicorns have stem cells, but the fact that Davidson was able to clone them suggests that they do. I'll reach out to him and get his thoughts on the idea."

o-o-o-o

The agoraphobia had only gotten worse as the years went by. At the start of each deployment, Joel had taken to burning from NASA to a meadow in Tibet so that he could spend a few minutes listening to Peri sing before doing the actual spacewalk. When the job was done they would burn back to the meadow so that he could calm down before going back for the next load. In order to explain the time gaps he'd told them that Peri needed some rest between trips when they were burning as frequently as this.

Dad was getting more and more upset as time passed and the panic attacks got worse. By now, Joel couldn't sleep through the night on his own; unless Peri sang over him all night, he always woke up screaming with the merciless emptiness tearing at his nightmares. Dad kept wanting to tell the folks at NASA, kept assuring Joel that John and Davis and Will and Karen were all good people, that they'd understand and get him the help he needed so that he could do the missions without the trauma.

Joel had produced the NASA rulebook and put his finger on the section that said any astronaut showing signs of agoraphobia was to be grounded immediately. Peri had called, wordlessly asking both of them if they really meant it, if they believed the reward worth the challenge. Both of them had bowed their heads and stepped up to the wheel again.

"My sacrifice is the dreams," Joel had told his father, early on. "Your sacrifice is letting me make my sacrifice." It had sounded less hokey in his head, but it was heartfelt. His father recognized the sincerity in the words and, reluctantly, accepted the message.

o-o-o-o

Today was solar power satellites. The array that he and Peri had already put up was beaming down over a gigawatt of power already, and Joel was scheduled to put up fifty more satellites in the next six months; the thought made him sick, but the idea of a United States (and, later, a world) that didn't need to burn coal or oil...well, he was feeling too sick to be actually excited about it, but it was enough to make him continue "squiring the phoenix", as Dad liked to put it. Dad was weird.

o-o-o-o

"Okay, the results came back on the new wand protection gear, and it looks like it works," Pat said. "As long as we leave a two-millimeter area at the tip of the wand uncovered, the thing can be used and will still survive in lunar conditions for at least twenty-four hours of constant exposure. Indefinitely, as long as it gets a rest in normal conditions every few hours."

The wand had been a problem from day one. It obviously couldn't be inside a skintight suit and still be used, and it turned out that the suit gloves were thick enough that Hermione couldn't use the wand while wearing them. They'd removed one glove, put a seal around her wrist to maintain suit integrity, and built a hardened cylindrical extension around her arm so that she could hold the wand inside the extension.

And then it turned out that the magic considered "inside a full-enclosure suit" to mean "can't effect any spells outside the suit."

They'd shortened the extension so that the last couple inches of the wand were sticking out through a seal. Testing in a low-pressure chamber indicated that the seal would hold pressure, so they gave it a try. Hermione had bounced up to the moon and done a Wand-Lighting Charm-the simplest, fastest spell they could come up with-then bounced straight back. After that there had been steadily longer trips as they'd experimented with different techniques for using magic in space development.

Brooms, it turned out, were way better than lunar rovers or bouncing along like the Michelin Man. Hermione hated using brooms on Earth, but on the moon she loved it. Falling felt like no danger at all in the reduced gravity, and the view across the lunar surface and out into space was breathtaking.

In all the heady excitement of revolutionizing space travel, they'd forgotten to consider the effects of repeated vacuum exposure on ten and three quarter inches of vine wood and dragon heartstring. The vacuum desiccation of the heartstring had ruined the wand and left Her Majesty's Government obliged to shell out ten thousand pounds in order to commission a replacement-apparently wand-makers did not care to repeat a previous product unless their objections were buried under a nice thick layer of Galleons. Thereafter, testing had been done with cheap knockoffs.

"In addition to the wand protection, we've also finished production on a new suit," Pat continued. "Which was only necessary since Ms Granger has been so inconsiderate as to outgrow yet another one." He mock-glared at her, drawing a laugh from everyone else at the table.

"Sorry, Pat," she said with an unrepentant grin; growing up around the Space Agency folks had worn a lot of the nervous formality off of her. It was a nice change from the stilted little girl who had first walked into his office and nearly killed herself with an unscheduled lunar jaunt. "If it's any comfort, Mom says I've probably topped out."

"Speaking of finishing things," Dan said. "The rovers have finally finished the survey of the alpha site, and it looks perfect for the settlement. The overhang on the cliff is completely solid so we don't have to worry about thermal differential causing a collapse anytime soon. Calculations show that even on dayside the facility will stay in the overhang's shade, so we don't have to worry about heat protection.

"One minor glitch; In the process of the survey, one of the rovers got stuck in a pothole; Hermione, any chance you could run up after lunch and pop it loose? Also, the Facilities team is anxious to start getting the shelters deployed; we were tentatively planning that for next month. Will that work around your exams?"

She shook her head. "Sorry, Dan, I'm going to be revising that entire month, and then Ron and I are going to Italy with my parents. We won't be back until after summer hols. Going up after lunch is no problem, though."

"Not even one little run before the exams?" he wheedled. "Just pop up with a team so they can set up a few instrument stations…?"

"Ignore him," Pat told her. "Enjoy the holiday. Say hi to your folks for me, and tell Ron that if he does anything inappropriate I'll drown him in liquid nitrogen."

o-o-o-o

Frank stared, wide-eyed, and then nudged his brother. When Rob glanced over, he pointed at the two gorgeous identical twin supermodels farther down the bar. "Isn't that Cindy Crawford?" he asked. "I didn't know she had a twin. Holy crap, I need to get her autograph."

Rob glanced over and snorted. "Nah, it's just a couple of 'Juicers. Don't bother."

Franked stared at him, puzzled. "What?"

"You haven't heard about this?" Rob asked. "Yeah, it's the Big New Thing, apparently. A lot of celebs have started selling their hair online. You buy some, buy some Polyjuice potion, and boom, you can be a movie star for a night. I hear that Harrison Ford hired a wizard to use a Hair-Regrowing charm on him so he could shave his head eight times a day. There's so many Harrisons walking around now that his hair is selling for, like, two bucks an ounce."

"Huh," Frank said. "I don't suppose Richard Dean Anderson is selling his, is he?"

Two weeks after discovering the existence of Juicing, Frank received ten strands of Richard Dean Anderson's hair in the mail. He had by far the best Jack O'Neill costume at the con.

Three months after discovering the existence of Juicing, Frank discovered cross-Juicing. It was eye-opening to see the differences in how Frank Thompson, Cindy Crawford, and Fran Drescher were treated on the streets of New York. It was another three months before he was willing to go home with a guy when he was being Cindy, but the experience was even more eye opening. After Cindy and Harrison reverted to being Frank and Pat, they spent the rest of the night drinking Malbec and talking about what they'd learned from their various experiences of cross-Juicing. A year later they were married.

o-o-o-o

It's amazing what can get into peer-reviewed journals. Even more amazing is the impact an apparently minor prank can have.

_Statistical Correlations between Meyer-Briggs Types and Aesthetic Qualities of Polyjuice Potion _sounded nice and innocuous. Personality types were mostly a curiosity, right? Unfortunately, a young undergrad with a sense of humor read the paper and posted a parody of it online. Sarah Jaynes assumed that _Character Analysis by Polyjuice: Honesty, Responsibility, and Marital Fidelity as Correlated with Expressed Similarity to Snot _should have been a completely obvious joke, but her humor was a little too deadpan for the mass media. The parody went viral and soon it was being discussed on serious news programs. Three months later, some corporations were requiring applicants to donate hair for a Polyjuice Potion, and then refusing them employment if the resulting potion looked, in Sally's words, "like boogers or cat puke." It would take eight years for the first lawsuit to reach the Supreme Court.

* * *

_**Author's Note**__: Squiring the Phoenix will be moving to a once-every-two-weeks schedule._


	5. Chapter 5

_**Author's Note:**__ Ordinarily I put this in the footer, but given the ending of this chapter I choose to have nothing after it._

_My mailing list can be found at __**bit. do /dks-list**__. "Squiring the Phoenix" will be concluding shortly. When it does, I will be publishing a new superheroes-in-the-real-world serial novel. List members will receive free copies of each chapter before it is posted for sale on Amazon. Due to Amazon's Terms of Service, once they are posted for sale the chapters will not be available elsewhere. _

* * *

"Hang on, I must have misheard you," Toni said in disbelief. "Say that again."

Lambert Smythe frowned. "The Gemino curse creates worthless copies of an object," he obligingly repeated.

"When you say 'worthless', what exactly do you mean? Like, if you copy a piece of gold the result is made of lead or something?"

"No one would create gold," he said with a frown. "The goblins are in a permanent state of war with anyone who performs counterfeiting or tampers with the valuable metal supply."

Toni shook her head in frustration. "Argh, that's not the— Okay, fine. Forget the gold. If you duplicate...say, a diamond, is it made out of glass?"

He shook his head. "No, the copy is indistinguishable from the original in the beginning. It simply degrades fairly rapidly—in general it decomposes into dust and then to nothing within a few days."

Toni stared at him. He couldn't really be this thick, could...oh, wait. Wizards. Right. She rubbed her head for a moment in frustration.

"Will the copy possess any magical properties of the original?" she asked.

"Hm," he said thoughtfully. "I...don't actually know. So far as I'm aware, no one's ever actually checked that."

Toni gave him a narrow-eyed look. "You're pranking me, aren't you?"

"What? No, why would I do that?" he asked in apparently honest confusion. "You're paying me for consultation, and I have a reputation to maintain."

She rubbed her head again and then said, with nigh-infinite patience, "Would you please cast Gemino on your wand, and then check to see if you can cast spells with the copy?"

"I'm afraid I can't," he said. "It requires a flick of the wand at the target, and there's no way to flick a wand at itself."

"Oh," she said.

"I do have a mokeskin pouch with me, if that will suffice...?" he said.

"Yes! Absolutely, do that!"

He took something invisible off his belt, twitched his wand at it with a quick 'Gemino!' and then picked up something invisible just to the right of the invisible thing he had originally put down. He mimed opening a bag and peering in, then stuck his arm in up to the shoulder.

"Hm, fascinating!" he said. "Yes, not only did it duplicate the pouch, but all the contents as well. Here's my pipe, and my tobacco, and a copy of...erm...some reading material, and my broom...yes, everything seems to be here." He reclaimed his arm and gave her a broad smile. "Very clever indeed! Still, it's of limited use; the broom will fall apart in two or three days, so I'm better off sticking with the real one."

She sighed. "Is there any reason you can think of that smoking the duplicated tobacco would be dangerous?" she asked.

"Noooo...I don't _think_ so," he said slowly. "The duplicates will degrade within a few days, meaning any smoke that was still in my lungs would turn to dust and then vanish. I wouldn't recommend doing it with food, or smoking duplicated tobacco on a regular basis, but there shouldn't be a harmful level of particulates left in the lungs from smoking a small amount."

"If you're sure it's safe, would you please try it?" she asked.

He shrugged, pulled a pipe and tobacco from nowhere, and lit up. "Hm, yes. Quite good," he said in approval.

"Is it the same as the original as far as you can tell?" she asked.

He nodded, extinguishing the pipe and tapping out the remaining contents, which he then Vanished. "Indeed. Still, it's a bit of a curiosity, isn't it? I wouldn't recommend smoking duplicate tobacco regularly, and the stuff is cheap enough that it's just as easy to buy it."

She took a deep breath, determined not to lose her temper. "Would you come with me, please?" She turned and led him back into the lab. Aubrey looked up and gave her a wave as she came in, then went back to what he was working on.

She led Smythe over to the cooler where the troll and unicorn blood samples were kept, and pulled out a vial of each.

"Could you please duplicate these for me?" she asked. He shrugged and did so; she took the resulting duplicates, put them in the mixer, and pressed the start button. A minute later, when the samples had been properly combined, she took the result out, loaded it into an injector, and pulled a mouse out of one of the nearest cages.

"Properly speaking, I should have a planned procedure and controls set up before doing this," she said, injecting the mixture into the mouse. "Right now, though, I just want to do a quick test to see if this idea is completely silly on the face of it."

With a scalpel from one of the drawers, she made a small incision on the mouse's left forefoot...which promptly healed closed. She set the mouse carefully back in its cage, walked silently to the autoclave to deposit her scalpel, and switched the device on.

"_Wizards,_" she muttered.

o-o-o-o

"Please try to hold very still," the technician said.

Milly Mockleworthington lay still, happily tapping her toes together and twiddling her thumbs where her hands were folded on her stomach.

"Ma'am, please try to remain _still_," the technician said with admirable patience. "That means your hands and feet as well."

Milly sighed. "Oh, fine. You Muggles and your silly ideas." She sighed again and went still.

"_Thank you_," the technician growled, carefully pushing Mute on the mic first. With the goddamn witch finally having stopped her goddamn fidgeting he pushed the button to slide the table inside the MRI and activated the scanner.

"Gotta say, Doc," the technician said to the researcher beside him. "I'm pretty sure you're right; magic really must cause brain damage. I hope you figure out how to fix it."

o-o-o-o

Peri was on Joel's shoulder every moment now, and never stopped singing. It made life a lot more pleasant for everyone who worked with Joel; the song of the phoenix soothed away worries and frustration, made headaches vanish, temporarily suppressed the symptoms of a cold, and left people cheerful and energized for hours.

"Do you guys think it's weird that Peri sings constantly?" Karen asked. "He didn't used to, back when they first came in."

Davis shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe he's just happy because things are going so well?"

"Yeah, but...it's weird, and a little disturbing," she said. "I mean, when you're around them, you _can't help_ but feel good. It's like the bird is shooting you up with Prozac. There's a whole question of free will here."

Davis looked at her is disbelief. "Are you _seriously_ complaining about the fact that you're in a better mood when the bird is singing at you?"

She grimaced. "Well...I dunno, it's bothering me is all. I think next time I see him I'm going to ask him to not do it around me anymore. I'd rather be Karen, instead of being forced to be happy-cheerful-Karen all the time."

Davis shrugged. "I think you're nuts but sure, whatever. Now, can we get back to these designs? We've got a review meeting in two days and they aren't finished yet."

o-o-o-o

"Good evening, I'm Peter Jennings and you're watching ABC World News Tonight. In a surprise announcement today, China has declared that it is nationalizing its wizarding community. In the future, all Chinese wizards will be considered national assets; although they will be given all possible comforts, they will also be required to perform assignments as directed by the office of the President. In addition, they will be required to donate sperm and eggs on a regular basis in order to enlarge the national wizarding population.

"The United States, Britain, and most European nations have all raised strident objections to these policies, from both among the wizarding and mundane populations. Economic sanctions are being discussed and may go into effect as soon as next week.

"In technology news, scientists at MIT have completed analysis on the transfigured carbon nanotube samples provided by Harry Potter. The actual analysis was completed under the effects of Liquid Luck, but all results were checked afterwards under normal conditions, and they feel confident that they can go into large-scale production within three months.

"Finally, NASA has announced that the deployment of the Icarus constellation of solar power satellites has been successful. President Clinton will be onhand for a ceremony at Cape Canaveral tomorrow in order to press the button activating the satellites, after which America will be free of dependency on fossil fuels. In addition, there will be a surplus of nearly one hundred gigawatts which will be sold to Canada and Mexico. Satellite deployment will continue, and it is expected that within ten years the entire North American continent will be powered exclusively from space. Elon Musk's Tesla Corporation is already building solar recharging stations around the country to take advantage of the nearly-free energy to power their new electric cars."

o-o-o-o

"Hey Karen, you wanted to see us?" Joel asked as he walked into her office and sprawled out in a chair, crossing his lanky legs at the ankle. He'd really shot up over the last eight years; the skinny teenager had been replaced with a six-foot-two young man with some serious muscle from horsing satellites around—even with Peri taking most of the weight, the things still weren't light.

Peri's liquid trills flowed through the room in a river of happiness and Karen felt the tension in her shoulders vanish.

"Yeah," she said. "I have a favor to ask. Peri, could you please stop singing for a minute?"

The bird completly ignored her.

Even through the happiness imposed by the phoenix song, Karen frowned. This wasn't right; Peri was a very cooperative person. He worked smoothly with the rest of the team and was pretty much always willing to donate a feather for study, shift heavy equipment around, or whatever else they needed. Occasionally someone would ask for something unreasonable just as a joke and he would give them a look of disgust and a flip of the feathers, but she couldn't think of a time when he'd refused a reasonable request.

Joel shrugged. "Sorry, Karen. He just seems happy these days; I think it's because things are going so well with the program. We're really making a difference. You know we can't exactly communicate in words, but he feels kind of...smug...about the fact that he and his person have done more to help humanity than any other phoenix ever." He smiled in tolerant amusement and scritched Peri's chest feathers. "I sometimes imagine all the phoenixes getting together around the water cooler and Peri strutting up and down going 'who da man? oh yeah, it's me, it's me, oh yeah' and all the other phoenixes sighing and bowing their heads."

Karen laughed. She was sure that, even without the phoenix song, it would have been a funny image; with the song, it was hilarious. Which was sort of the problem, actually; she couldn't even trust her own sense of humor around the bird. Still, there was nothing for it; she couldn't exactly tape Peri's beak shut.

"Okay, never mind," she said. "Anyway, the final design review is being done for the Marsbase dome components and I wanted to get your input. You'll be asked to join the review committee tomorrow, but for now I want to go over things with you one-on-one to make sure that we've optimized for your carry capacity, work out the best timetable for deliveries, and generally make sure that neither of you see any issues. In addition to the components themselves, you'll be taking along a team that will do the setup while you haul new elements up. Anyway, here's the basic component design..."

o-o-o-o

"Hey big brain, any word back on the applications?" Pat asked with a grin. Based on the fact that the girl was right in the middle of her Happy Dance, he was pretty sure he knew the answer.

She brandished a fistful of envelopes at him. "I got in! I got in! I _got in!_ Wooohooo!"

He snickered. The twenty-year-old version of Hermione was a lot more socially ept and a lot less of a spaz than her twelve-year-old self had been, but sometimes the younger Hermione still peeked out.

"And _where_ did you get in, if I may ask?" he said with exaggerated politeness.

"Everywhere! Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Stanford, MIT...everywhere! Squeeeeeeee!" By now she was just vibrating in place, clutching the envelopes to her chest and bouncing up and down at super speed, so fast that Xare hopped to a nearby bookshelf with a disgruntled squawk.

He laughed. "That's lovely; you totally earned it. Now, do I need to leave you alone for a minute or do you think you can come down to Earth? Lunar City just finished digging the Gamma tunnels and—"

"Squeeeeeeeeee!"

He shook his head with a smile and went down to the lounge to get some coffee. When he came back he pushed the door opening, already saying, "Okay, so, we've got these new—"

"Squeeeeeeeeee!"

He shook his head and headed back to the lounge to drink his coffee. There were eighty new colonists waiting in the launch bay, but they could wait a little longer.

o-o-o-o

"Well, that explains a lot," Dan said, leaning back in his chair and studying the scans thoughtfully.

"So...are we really going to publish this?" Bill asked hesitantly. "I mean, what happens if the wizards find out that casting spells really _does_ cause brain damage?"

Dan looked unhappy. "I think we have to, or the grant goes away. We can keep it dull though...title it something like _Comparative Imaging of Enhanced and non-Enhanced Cerebral Tissue_. Avoid using the words 'magic', 'mundane', or 'brain damage.' Maybe it can go under the radar."

"We have an obligation to tell the wizards what's happening to them, don't you think?" Bill said. "I mean, not telling them would basically be letting them hurt themselves. It would be like _not_ telling people that asbestos is bad for them when they're breathing it every day."

Dan scrubbed at his face. "Look, I don't like it either, but this is like cold fusion—it's such a strong claim that we better be _absolutely sure_ before we say anything. What if we're wrong? We freak people out and ruin our own reputations for nothing.

"For that matter, these results raise more questions than they answer. Why are the effects so specific? Wizards don't lose memories, or the ability to speak—they just get...wacky. Purple robes and green hats, all that stuff. And they don't see simple possibilities that are perfectly obvious. Shoot, my daughter came up with all sorts of ways to exploit Aguamenti, and she's only four. And it's not even all of them—_some_ of the wizards are perfectly sensible, like that Potter kid who's been doing all the work in nanotube production and biogerontology, Granger over at the UKSA...even Slughorn seems pretty balanced from what I've seen at his presentations. Why does it only affect some of them? "

"Maybe it's a genetic thing?" Bill suggested. "Aren't Potter and Granger both from mundane families?"

Dan took his glasses off and scrubbed his face with both hands. "Not sure. I _think_ I remember some article in one of the journals talking about the Slughorn family as one of the oldest in wizarding Britain, so he's probably a pureblood. And Potter was adopted; not sure what his genetic parents were. Anyway, good thought. Let's look into it. And let's do it _fast;_ you're right that if it's true then we need to tell them all quickly."

"Yeah," Bill said unhappily. "Also, I've got a friend over at Caltech who can check our results. She'll keep it on the downlow if I ask, at least for a while."

o-o-o-o

The cave in Poland was very soothing. Nice and small, the walls almost within reach. The lanterns surrounding him lit the space quite well, banishing even the slightest trace of darkness and leaving him to study the colors of the flowstone around him.

Joel sat cross-legged, leaning back against one wall and taking deep breaths. The asteroid mining robot that he was supposed to be deploying was sitting in an abandoned warehouse in Detroit; it would be safe until he had prepared himself for being out from under the protective aura of Peri's song. The Xanax had kicked in about ten minutes ago, so it was time to get moving. His doctor said he was getting near the maximum safe dose and was looking around for a better course of treatment. For now it was enough to get him through a two-minute dump-and-go deployment, as long as he was careful to only look at the asteroid under his feet instead of at the stars around him.

o-o-o-o

"I'm sorry, Mr. Morrison is in a meeting right now," the receptionist said. "Could you please have a seat? He'll be with you shortly."

Janey shrugged. "Works for me. I'm paid by the hour; if he wants to keep me cooling my heels at a hundred bucks a minute I've got no problem with that." She dropped into one of the leather Bauhaus chairs and pulled a copy of "Harry Potter: The Philosopher's Stone" out of her backpack. Potter's biography was one of the more interesting things she'd read this year; she was excited to hear that there were supposed to be six more books.

Four thousand dollars later, the receptionist's phone buzzed with an internal call. She picked it up, listened, and responded quietly enough that Janey didn't catch the words.

Three seconds later, Morrison came bursting out of his office. "Terribly sorry to keep you waiting," he said, carefully not using her name in front of his receptionist. "I didn't realize you were here. Please, won't you join me?"

Janey made a point of folding down the corner of her page and tucking the book away before standing up, glancing pointedly at her watch, and preceding him into his office.

Once inside she was all business. "I need your signature on this," she said, pulling out two copies of a document and setting them on his desk. "It's the standard form that says that you will accept my statements under Veritaserum and absolve me of all responsibility in the event that the information has been leaked elsewhere or if it was taken from me by force and I was then Obliviated."

He read through it quickly and signed both copies. She tucked one away in her backpack and then pulled out a giant stone bowl that was far too big to fit in the pack.

"Here's the 'Sieve," she said, setting it on his desk. "It's a Gemini, so you've got one, maybe two days before it decomposes. I assume you've got the Veritaserum?"

"Yes, of course," he said, rifling his desk drawer for a small bottle and handing it to her.

She set one drop on her tongue and handed him back the bottle. "I have made no copies of the information I am about to present to you, nor have I communicated it to anyone else. So far as I am aware, what I am about to give you is the only copy of that information in existence outside of the original source. I am not a perfect Occlumens and therefore this testimony under Veritaserum may be considered reliable.

"Okay, here's the memory," she said, tapping her wand to her temple and pulling out a thin silver string. She dropped it in the bowl, and closed up her bag.

"Whatever the information is, I hope it's worth all the secrecy," she told him. "Payment is due on receipt, in cash, so I'll need that now."

"Absolutely," he said, trying not to stare in fascination at the wavering silver pool. "Just head down the hall to your right and tell my CFO the amount; he'll have the cash ready."

"Pleasure doing business with you," Janey Mnemonic said, walking out of his office.

o-o-o-o

Harry stared at the Jumbo-tron in amazement as the satellite so far above them began to extrude carbon nanotube cables from both sides. The fact that the nanotube assemblers had been designed, built, tested, and deployed in under two years was a feat of engineering that bordered on the miraculous. It would have been utterly impossible without enough Liquid Luck to make a series of eight thousand lightning bolts destroy the lab where the work had been done and everything for a mile around. All the lab workers had been killed in the process, but the data had been carefully streamed offsite in real time so none of it was lost. All the lab workers had been terminal cancer patients who understood that this was a suicide job, and the lab had carefully been built in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota with the expectation of its destruction. No matter how much collateral damage had been caused, the job had succeeded.

A cheer went up from everyone watching. It would be days before the cable actually touched down, but this was it: once the thin anchor cable had been secured, robot spinners could run additional lines up it until the resulting tower was strong enough to support thousands of tons of people and cargo, moving up and down in simple elevator cars.

For a certain segment of humanity, this was the holy grail: a space elevator. Humanity could now reach space—and, from there, the stars—without needing a phoenix.

Harry wiped away the tears and swallowed around the lump in his throat.

o-o-o-o

"Good evening, my fellow Americans." President Bush's tailors and speech coaches had done their absolute best to give him a sense of gravitas; the best they had been able to manage was 'pinched'. Still, it was the words and the actions that were needed, not charisma.

"The fall of the Twin Towers is a tragedy from which America is still reeling. Search and rescue efforts are underway, and I offer my thanks and my prayers to all the brave men and women of both the mundane and magical community who have stepped up to assist in this time of trouble. The magical healing has saved dozens of lives, for which we are eternally grateful.

"Despite all that magic and medicine can do, thousands of Americans have lost their lives and hundreds more are yet to be found. Several square miles of Manhattan are considered unsafe to live due to the potentially harmful smoke and dust fallout from the Towers. FEMA is in talks with the wizarding community to see if there is a way to clear the dust magically, although it is too soon to have an answer.

"The terrorist organization Al-Qaeda has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the act. In a recorded video message the head of the organization, Osama Bin-Laden, has declared that the attack was motivated by, and I quote, 'the alliance of the Great Satan with the devil-spawn of magic.'

Bush paused, his face tight in clearly suppressed anger.

"In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, I authorized deployment of magical intelligence-gathering assets. Wizards employed at the CIA dispatched an owl to deliver a letter to Bin-Laden. The contents of that letter were quite simple: We are coming.

"A mixed unit of Delta Force operators followed the owl; upon discovering the location of their target the wizarding operators Side-Along Apparated their mundane cohorts into Bin-Laden's headquarters. Twenty-seven Al-Qaeda members were killed and eighteen captured, including Bin-Laden himself. As these individuals were taken as prisoners of war, our military was free to use Legilimancy to obtain critical information about the rest of the organization.

"Like most terrorist organizations, Al-Qaeda was organized as a series of cells, each of which answered to only one handler. Not even Bin-Laden himself was aware of all members of the organization.

"This did not save them. Despite their best efforts, Delta Force worked their way through the chain of handlers in under twenty-four hours. To the best of our knowledge, every single member of Al-Qaeda is either in custody or dead."

He paused, allowing those words to sink in.

"Captured members will be tried as military prisoners, meaning that they have no right to Fifth Amendment protection. They will be interrogated under Veritaserum and those admitting to terrorist crimes will be executed. Should any member of the organization be discovered who has not performed any actual acts of terror, they will be convicted as accomplices before the fact and sentenced to life imprisonment in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.

"In this time of sorrow, my heart goes out to all those who have lost loved ones or homes. Rest assured, I will do all that is in my power to aid you in this time of trouble. All those recovered who are injured will be given Healion at federal expense in order to fully restore them. Where we are able to recover the bodies, Congress has authorized emergency funding to perform full resurrections. As you are aware, performing a resurrection requires the assistance of someone with a close connection to the deceased. FEMA will be establishing a registry in Manhattan; anyone who has lost someone in the attack is encouraged to sign up so that we can reach you in the event that your loved one's body is recovered.

"America has taken a terrible blow this week, yet still we stand. In the face of adversity, we shall not yield. In the face of attack, we shall conquer. To all those in the world who ally themselves with Al-Qaeda or believe in their cause, I say this: Bring it on. We will do to you what we have done to the cowards that struck at innocent men and women. If you feel that your cause is worth dying for, we will be glad to help you with that.

"Thank you and good night."


	6. Chapter 6

_**Author's Note:**__ As I did last week, I'm putting this in the header rather than the footer; you'll see why. _

_I have a mailing list: /dks-list. Very soon now I will be starting an original novel; members of the mailing list will receive each chapter for free before it goes up for sale on Amazon. Due to Amazon's Terms of Service, once's it's published on Amazon it will not be available anywhere else. _

* * *

The Entities spoke in universes; the child's query spawned a new one, energy springing forth from a series of detonations that could be labeled only catastrophic. It was a small, tight universe, far too energetic to allow for matter, and the blast waves of Creation bounced back and forth, interfering with each other both constructively and destructively.

Life sprang into existence in the chaotic vortices of those waves. Beings made of energy fields surfed the fires of Creation, exploring to the limits of their reality. They came together, communicating in modulated electromagnetic fields. Philosophy and poetry and science and art came to be and grew to great heights as each of the field-beings sought their own way to express the joy of their existence.

The universe expanded and expanded, its physical laws shifting as time passed. Quantum effects grew to affect the macroscopic level, worldlines growing and shifting and changing. The effects washed through the endless quadrillions of intelligences; many of them ceased to exist...and then came back...or didn't...or flipped between the two states...or suddenly had never existed at all. Energy blossomed from nowhere; in its wake trillions of lives were destroyed and created. And then the physical laws shifted once more and time ceased to be; every particle, every creature, every ray of light was frozen in its place, unmoving but filled with potential should time ever return.

The Entities spoke in universes, and the thought behind this universe was, for them, relatively simple. An ancestral human could not have understood the nuances and overtones, but the basic message might have been comprehensible:

_Well?! What happened next, Daddy?!_

* * *

Harry dropped into the chair with a sigh, taking his glasses off and scrubbing his face with both hands.

"No luck with Ignotus, huh?" Hermione asked sympathetically, sliding him a mug of butterbeer.

Harry put his glasses back on and took a long pull on the butterbeer. "Sort of," he said. "I mean, sure, he knows _how_ to create another Resurrection Stone, but he didn't have any good ideas for automating the process. The best I've got so far is to have teams of wizards get together and do it. Except it requires a _hell_ of a lot of power, and all that power is taken from the source permanently. We've tried feeding it power from non-human sources like magical animals and such...it works, but it's so inefficient it's not worth the trouble. It looks like it really needs human magic."

"Wizards on their death beds?" she asked, clearly just checking the obvious and not expecting a yes.

Harry shrugged. "Only way I can see to do it," he said. "Still won't help much. I did some basic calculations; given the average amount of power left in a wizard dying of old age, it'll require about a hundred dying wizards giving up everything they have left, plus another eleven wizards to focus and manipulate the energy—ten to gather it and direct it to the last, who actually casts the spells. Plus, the ritual takes a minimum of two days, and it can be up to a month depending on various factors, not all of which Ignotus understood."

She grimaced. "Well that's not good. We're not going to be able to produce enough of them like that."

Harry nodded morosely and took another pull on the butterbeer. "Tell me about it. Ten resurrections per day and thirty per week without draining the Stone too much...it's not even remotely enough. Just getting the Twin Towers victims all resurrected is going to take two years."

"I thought you were experimenting with recharging the Stone?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Yeah, we got it working, but it doesn't scale well. You can only feed power to the Stone if you're in physical contact and it's very inefficient. I did a Fermi calculation—if we got a hundred wizards roughly at Dumbledore's level to recharge the Stone as often as possible, and they all exhausted themselves each time, we could add another five resurrections per day, ten per week. There's _maybe_ two hundred wizards in the world at that level, and ten of them are former Dark Lords sitting in Nurmengard."

"Do you need wizards that powerful?" Hermione asked. "Could Squibs do it? They don't have much power, but there's an awful lot of them. Maybe each one could give just a little power and together it would be enough?"

Harry shook his head. "There's an overhead cost just to get the connection started, and then a huge fraction of what you send down the connection is just wasted. A normal wizard like Macgonagall could barely contribute at all."

Hermione nodded and took a sip of her own butterbeer. She didn't used to like the stuff, but it had grown on her as she got older. "How's Professor Macgonagall doing, anyway?" she asked. "I haven't seen her in months."

Harry chuckled. "As good as ever. She's at Hogwarts again, terrifying the next generation of first years with her 'Transfiguration is dangerous' speech."

Hermione smiled. "Remember the look on her face when you resurrected her?" She drew her face up into a bitten-lemon pucker and looked down her nose at Harry. "I am not entirely certain that I approve of your interference with the natural order, Mr. Potter...but thank you. Now, where are my clothes? This hospital gown is drafty."

Harry smiled. "You have to admit, as first words go it's pretty memorable."

For the rest of the evening the two friends sat together in their private room at Mary's Place; it was the only time of the week that either of them allowed themselves away from the pressures of work. Both of them felt that what they did was too important to waste time on fripperies such as drinking butterbeer with old friends...at least, not too often.

o-o-o-o

Hal reached the top of the hill, unfolded his camp chair, and sat down. He looked out over the rolling Martian deserts, ancient red sands stretching as far as the eye could see. Off in the distance a dust storm was blowing towards him, a titanic wall of fury that would scour anything it touched with abrasive sand. The weather satellites said that it would sweep over the base in a few hours, but he had some time.

Twisting around he studied the base behind him. It didn't look like much; it was a squat bunker fifty feet on a side and ten feet high, with only two entrances: a personnel door that looked much like a fire door from Earth, and a garage-door-style cargo entrance thirty feet wide. Right now the windward side was half-buried in rust-red sand, and after the duststorm went through most of the place would be completely underground. According to the rotation, it would be Hal's job to bulldoze the doors clear.

The bunker was deceptive; it was nothing but the top of the elevator shaft leading down to Redsand City. Hal and his family had arrived three months ago, and he'd been amazed—it was one thing to be told that you would be living in an underground city of half a million people, but it was something else entirely to actually see it. The tunnels seemed to go on forever, and the Atrium at the center was two hundred meters high and sixty meters in diameter; the railings at each level were filled with planters that were mostly full of ivy and other hanging plants that tumbled down from one level to the next, making the whole place look like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

As beautiful as it was, it was also functional. The ivy had been heavily genetically engineered; the vines and leaves came in a bewhildering array of colors, all carefully calculated for their positive psychological effects. The leaves were the size of a man's spread hand, increasing the carbon dioxide absorption, thereby reducing the strain on the air scrubbers. The subtle perfume they emitted was relaxing and comforting, again to help prevent tunnel-madness. Psychological profiles on the earliest colonists had revealed that the all-red-all-the-time hues of the base were a primary cause in the stress and nightmares that everyone seemed to develop after a few weeks. A lot of effort had been put into widening the tunnels and adding aesthetics to the place—the plants, giant murals, even a waterpark.

Hal grinned behind his helmet. Wasn't that an amazing thing? A waterpark on a planet that was nothing but desert. It had been easy enough, though—Joel and Hermione had bounced a few dozen wizards up one day, they all cast the firehose version of Aguamenti and kept it going overnight and boom, giant waterpark.

Of course, the city wasn't _that_ large, and they kept sending colonists up faster than new tunnels could be dug. Things were getting tight, and people were starting to complain. The crowding wasn't the worst part though, at least not for Hal. For Hal, the worst part was the noise. There was never a time when it was just quiet; there were always people running through the corridors outside his cubic, and the door wasn't thick enough to keep the sound out. When he was out in the city itself the noise was constant, and loud. For a guy who'd been raised on a farm in South Dakota it was like being hit in the face all day every day.

Hence why he came out here. Aside from the emergency frequency, his suit's radio channels were all on mute. Unless something went disastrously wrong he could just sit, contemplate the stark majesty of Mars, and enjoy the silence.

o-o-o-o

"Hey love, have you thought about the colony thing?" Jacques asked.

Monique smiled up at him. "Tell me again why you want to do this," she said. The sparkle in her eye and the slightly teasing tone of her voice made him cautiously optimistic.

"It's an incredible opportunity," he said with a shrug. "Aphrodite needs hydraulic engineers badly; they're paying a million francs a year. They also need doctors, so you won't be bored. It'll look great on our resumes—we spend a year there and we can write our own ticket when we come back. Plus...think about it. We would be part of the First-In team. The first humans on the first exoplanet. Every step we took would be the first time a human had ever touched that patch of earth. Even the stars would be different...new constellations, new views on the face of God. Everything will be new—the view in the telescope shows what Aphrodite was like eighty years ago. We will get to see what it's like _now_; it will be like stepping through time."

She leaned over and kissed him. "I love it when you get passionate," she said. "I've given notice at the hospital and reached out to my cousin to see if she'd like to housesit for us for a year. I know we can come home for weekends if we want, but the website said that there's a limited number of travel slots and we don't get paid for any time we're offworld. Better just to stay there the whole year, I'd say."

His eyes lit up; he grabbed her by the shoulders and whirled her around, laughing and kissing her time after time.

o-o-o-o

"Hey, honey, is it true about the genes?" Bill asked excitedly, giving his wife a kiss as she came in the door.

Helen looked at him in confusion. "What?" she asked.

"They said on the news that you guys found the Atlantean gene sequence and you're going to be able to turn mundanes into wizards!" Bill was actually holding his breath in anticipation; he loved his wife dearly, but if he was being honest it had always bothered him that she was a wizard and he wasn't. Sometimes, in the deep of the night when he couldn't sleep, he found himself wondering if she was settling. She was beautiful, rich, a powerful wizard, and even a candidate for this year's Nobel. He was an insurance adjuster; what did he have to offer a woman like that? But, if she really _could_ make him a wizard...well, maybe then he could measure up a little.

She sighed and kissed him. "Damnit, I told Gunther to keep his mouth shut," she growled. "Stupid kid; the media always gets it wrong. I'm sorry, love but no—we found a group of genes that are present in every wizard subject we tested, but none of the mundanes. The Atlantean marker is probably in there somewhere, but it's going to be years before we can really identify it. And then a long time before we could even conceivably start inserting it into mundanes...and even then it would probably have to be done in vitro with a fertilized egg. The idea of turning adult mundanes into wizards...I'm sorry, love, but it's not very likely." She wrapped her arms around him and rested her chin on his shoulder; she knew perfectly well how he felt. One of the greatest failures of her life was her inability to convince him of how perfect he was; wizard or mundane, scientist or insurance adjuster...none of that mattered. What mattered is that he was _him_, the man she adored, who made her feel complete, who could always bring her out of a bad mood. He gave melt-worthy footrubs, his advice about how to deal with people had allowed her to navigate the political shoals of her career, and he cooked food that was better than most restaurants. And, of course, there was the sex...the mind-blowing sex that always left her gasping and unable to feel her feet.

Somehow, she'd never been able to convey any of that in a way he believed. And now that stupid little _shit_ Gunther had leaked totally false information to the press and the love of her life was going to be miserable for days, even if he wouldn't show it.

"Oh," he said, looking utterly crushed. Ellen cursed mentally and swore that she would fire Gunther first thing in the morning. And then black-ball him from the scientific community. And maybe set him on fire.

She hugged Bill tighter, trying to physically press the truth of her love from her body into his but knowing she wouldn't be able to.

He held her for a moment longer, then stepped back and pasted a smile on his face. "Well, that's fine then; it did sound pretty wild. Anyway, your timing is good, because dinner just came out of the oven. I've got poached salmon, stuffed mushrooms, and for dessert I made a chocolate gelatto that came out pretty well. Why don't you get settled and I'll serve up?"

o-o-o-o

"Storage formula, version 86, trial 5. Caster is Mathilda Jones, researcher is Ben Johansson." Ben turned off the recorder and picked up his pad. "Okay Maddy, whenever you're ready."

Maddy dipped her left hand into the forty-milliliter jar of reddish-purple fluid and waved her wand in the right. "Wingardium Leviosa," she said, pointing her wand at the small lead weight on the table in front of her. The weight that she'd never been able to move in eighty-five versions and over five hundred trials...or, for that matter, in thirty-six years of life. Being a Squib was a frustrating existence in wizarding or mundane society.

The weight rattled.

Maddy's eyes went huge and her hands shook so badly she dropped her wand.

"Maddy, you did it!" Ben shouted. "And look, look at the formula!"

Numbly, Maddy turned her eyes down to the jar of liquid her hand was still resting in. Instead of the original rich red-purple it was now more of a pastel orange.

"I did it," she whispered. "It worked. Oh my god, it worked."

"Congratulations," Ben said, resting a hand on her shoulder. "Let me buy you a beer; we need to celebrate this."

She shook her head, scooping the wand up in determination. "Not yet. I want to actually see it fly. I think we just need more magic—how are we fixed?"

Ben jumped to his feet and pulled the cabinet open. Inside was a twenty-gallon tank of the prototype storage fluid, all of it the rich purple-red of stored magic.

"We had Wortlethorp in yesterday to charge it up," Ben said as he carefully dispensed a liter. "You got it to rattle with only forty, so let's start with a hundred and work up from there. I bet you'll have the thing flying around by dinnertime!"

In point of fact, it took one hundred and seventeen milliliters of stored magic and two hours of careful experimentation before Maddy, a Squib who'd never been able to float so much as a feather, was twirling a hundred grams of lead around the room like a frenetic butterfly.

o-o-o-o

"Congrachulationz ya pass the test the job pays twenny bucks an hour ya'll be drug tested twice a month they find anyt'ing yer fired do ya want the job?" the interviewer asked disinterestedly; he'd said these same words to forty people today and there were more than a hundred still in line outside.

"Yes, very much, please!" the kid in front of his desk said, nodding eagerly. Black kid, sixteen years old although he was probably lying about his age, skinny as a rail with a hole in his jeans; the only way he could have said 'wrong side of the tracks' more loudly was if he'd help up a neon sign. The interviewer mentally shrugged; he didn't care where the bodies came from as long as they were warm and could do the job. He had a quota to fill.

Fortunately, there were plenty of candidates. It had turned out that there were a _lot_ of Squibs in the population, and a job charging Magion tanks was easy money.

o-o-o-o

Mandy paused to scratch her nose, then slid her arm back into the robot sleeve. This was the part of her job she loved the most—she was mundane as mundane could be, but give her a wand, a sleeve, and a hundred gallons of Magion and she was good to go.

She made sure that she had a good grip on the wand and her left hand in the Magion tank, aimed the wand at the palette of crates and pushed the button; the sleeve swirled her arm and hand in the proper pattern and a prerecorded voice said "Wingardium Leviosa!"

The palette and its contents rose obediently into the air; Mandy shifted it over to the appropriate spot on the freighter's deck and set it down carefully, then pushed the button to end the spell and checked her readouts.

And frowned. The gauge on her control panel said that her tank of Magion had dropped from 99.87% color saturation to 95.01%; the expected weight of a palette of coffee shouldn't have taken more than two percent, so something was wrong.

"Hey Joe," she called to her foreman. "Either they mislabeled the crates or somebody's smuggling again, because that palette's too heavy."

o-o-o-o

Harry Potter III and his brother Remus were on hand to watch with tears in their eyes when the first mass-produced Resurrection Stone rolled off the conveyor belt.

Remus smiled sadly. "Granddad would have loved to see this," he said.

Harry nodded sadly. "Yeah," he said softly.

o-o-o-o

In the tunnels of Lunar City, Joel sprawled comfortably in his lounger, a sippy-cup of whiskey in the cupholder to his right and an actual paper copy of Moby Dick in his hands. Peri perched on the left arm of the chair, watching his person quietly.

The room was small even by Lunar standards—four meters deep, two and a quarter meters wide, three meters high. Rooms this size were typically used by transients who were only here for a few nights. Joel loved it, especially after he'd set up some shoji screens to get it sectioned up into comfortably small areas. He'd done his share; he'd bounced half of the current colonists up here, deployed most of the nodes in the System Scan telescope, deployed two thirds of the asteroid-mining robots in the System, collected more tons of mined materials than he could remember, and even been the carrier for the first ever trip to Aphrodite. He'd kept working into his nineties; by any definition, he'd done his share for humanity. He'd earned his retirement, and the choice of how to die.

The Xanax had burned out his liver twelve times before they'd shifted him over to the newer, stronger Xocormen. That controlled the fear better and left him less fuzzy, but eventually the agoraphobia got bad enough that he was on nearly-lethal doses of that as well. Over the years, Peri had spilled a swimming pool of tears on him just to keep him functional. He was tired of it. He was tired of living with fear, of being unable to visit a friend in their perfectly-normal-sized-yet-terrifyingly-large home. He was tired of...all of it.

As of today, it was over. Today had been his last bounce; he'd taken the First-In team out to Vera. He'd loaded himself up with enough Xocormen ahead of time that he'd been able to look around for a minute; he wanted to remember the glorious red grass and puffball trees and what they meant about his achievements.

Now, he could just be quiet in a comfortable space. He had his favorite book in his hands, the taste of a perfect Macallan-25 in his mouth, and Peri beside him. The sleeping pills dissolved in the Macallan would kick in within a few minutes and he could peacefully drift off. He'd left orders that he wasn't to be resurrected.

He reached out and petted the firebird's back with one shaky finger. "We did our share, didn't we, old friend?" he asked quietly. The firebird stroked his head along Joel's hand, cooing softly, then hopped into Joel's lap.

Joel smiled and went back to his book, stroking Peri's back softly as the pills slowly killed him. His last thought as he drifted off for the Long Sleep was to wonder whom Peri would find next, and how amazing that child's life would be.

* * *

Universes were born and grew and died as the tale wound to a close. An allegory comprehensible to ancestral humans might perhaps have made the conversation sound like so:

_That was a scary story, Daddy._

_I know, little one. But it's all in the past now. Sleep well—and don't forget to clean up._

_Yes, Daddy._

All the universes that the little Entity had spawned over the course of the bedtime story swirled into concepts and flew through non-space to join with their creator. All of the stars and planets and motes of dust from all of them were remembered in perfect clarity. All of the beings who had lived and loved and died in all of those universes became a tiny fraction of the Entity that was the ultimate culmination of their species.

And that Entity drifted off into sleep, shivering in delighted horror at the story of the long-gone thing called Death.

**~= Finis =~ **

* * *

Thank you all for reading. It's been a real pleasure writing this for you and, if you enjoyed it, you should drop a thank-you to heiligeEzel on Reddit thanking her for creating "Following the Phoenix", of which this is a continuation.


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